When Speaking of the Devil, Whisper…
Just a few weeks after my post evaluating backup and recovery solutions for Linux, we had a hard failure on one of the machines that we use for daily editing work. It holds most of the master files for active books. It was one of those failures that ends up being cheaper to replace the machine rather than repair it.
On the plus side, it was an excuse to pick up one of the quad-core Intel machines that Gateway and others are deep-discounting right now. And it was a perfect lesson in the value of regular backups. Since we Ghost the machine daily (sometimes more often, using Ghost’s triggers), we were able to recover our data with just a few hours of lost work. It takes about ten minutes to set up automated backup tasks in Ghost and other backup software, and then you just forget about it until you need it (and you WILL need it!).
On the minus side, I’m now starting to be obsessed with data protection…a rack of RAID is just what we need right now…