By Ben May

If you’re reading this, then you’re using a computer and I have a feeling, reading the Design House Blog is not the only thing you do on your computer. We all use our computers every day for all kinds of important tasks.

A couple of days ago I noticed a clunking noise coming from on of the servers. Naturally I wanted to investigate and get ride of the noise. I pulled the side off the server and took a closer look. As it sounded, it was a power supply fan failing. Lucky I invested in commercial grade power supplies, with redundant cooling fans running, so no damage would come of this. Never the less, it was time to swap over the power supplies and get the server back up asap.

Ironically, two months ago I performed maintenance on all three servers, and replaced power supplies in the other two servers, and didn’t think it was required to replace this one.

However, while I was down working on this server, and had the afternoon free, I decided to test out our disaster recovery plan and backup systems. I had other people using the other servers so it wasn’t a full test of our disaster recovery plan, but I still went ahead testing on the secondary mail server, database and web development server.

After restoring from one of the terabyte backup drives, I was fortunate enough to be able to successfully create and repopulate about 200 MySQL databases and load back up about 95 websites, and all of which operated fine.

Hopefully, all of us backup these days, with external Hard drives being so affordable, but how often do you test your backup is working?

You might plug your drive in every day and backup, but is it actually doing that? It may be having errors, partially copying things, all kinds of errors.

You need to be prepared, or have in place sufficient plans for when your computer dies and looses everything.

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