Inadvertently, a fresh start

So I moved in September 2008.В В  This blog had a fair number of posts, then – nothing especially interesting, but a few years of stuff I had written.В  A couple comments.В  Well no more of that :-)В  I had set up Amanda to back up the dinky little web server hosting a few things of mine. Turns out I had set it up…poorly, so really the only backup I had was the first one that had run. It was supposed to do a full back up once a month, with incrementals the rest of the time. It did a few half-assed incrementals after being set up, but nothing I could use. Basically, so much time had elapsed since the initial backup that it was basically pointless except for some older static files that I did recover. This is all stuff I read (and dutifully ignored) but it bears repeating:

  • Understand what you’re doing. If it’s arcane it’s probably broken.
  • Test your restores!

When I moved I decided I wanted to redo the web server’s drive layout. I went ahead and blew the whole thing away because, hey, I have backups! This was followed a couple hours later by a sinking feeling and much lamentation when it became clear that the backups were useless. The big casualty was the MySQL database. I was able to recover things I hadn’t used in forever, but the WordPress database was really old.

Oh well. In a way, it’s kind of refreshing to start over. I’m done with Amanda for now though…back to my homegrown rsync setup.

February 12, 2009 В· agw В· No Comments
Posted in: Linux

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