A man much wiser than myself once said, "Blessed are the paranoid, for they have made backups".

Myself, I have a dedicated and fully automated backup server on my network. It backs up all of my smart clients' stuff from systems I remotely admin, as well as the important stuff on the LAN. And of course it's sporting a RAID1 array and syncs daily to an external drive. And is on the same UPS as my networking and phone gear, so it's got... 258 minutes of run time after the power fails, if the UPS firmware can be trusted to know such things (which it probably can't be). The UPS manufacturer is one of my clients so if it punks out on me I can get help to hassle their service organization.

I don't trust that newfangled cloud stuff. I've talked to several people lately who are going back to real no-5h17 physical, can put your hands on them servers. A potential client wants to get his head out of the cloud, too, but he can't seem to find the checkbook for it and I won't do the thing for free just to land a cheapskate on my active clients list.

Even worse is having a hard drive failure -- and no backups.

 

 

Yep, that way all of us can "stay on topic", yet have a chatty place.

UnregisteredUser,
What I mean by cloud is all users log in to one central system securely, whether it be through the local network, or over the air through the satellite. All applications and data are supposed to be on ONE server so I don't have to keep updating and backing up 5 individual computers. Saves me time. No data was lost with the hard drive failure, only my highly customized system. New server gets RAID on it, and I am planning to back up to a server remotely over the internet, as I have a "late night free zone" where they don't count any bandwidth from midnight to 5AM. I can schedule the backup to run during this time. We are also gonna get a good external hard drive. Any suggestions? So what sort of systems do you run?

 

She might like those golden showers!

 

Photoshop.

 

Oh! You're a young guy, huh? That's client/server in the original, true meaning of the term.

If you can budget for external SCSI and real enterprise drives, go that route and jam 'em into a nice hot-swap enclosure. If not, well... buy extras so you're not stuck with compatibility problems when your commodity drives start going toes up in 18 months. As for specific vendors, well... ya rolls yer dice ya takes yer chances. I don't have any brand preferences any more, having learned the hard way that historical performance even of the exact same part number is not, as they say, an indicator of future returns.

Here in the office everything is Debian except for one development server that runs OpenBSD and FreeBSD in a dual boot setup -- I only use that one these days when I need a resource constrained system for code testing, and otherwise run whatever else I need in v1rtual machines on my workstation. Out in the world I've got several flavors of Linux and BSD, four AIX boxen, and even one old SCO Unix box that refuses to die. I'm hoping to talk that client into going with Debian or OpenBSD before that machine loses its magic smoke.

The four AIX were supposed to migrate to one big RHEL box in June but for some reason that didn't happen... I'm not a big fan of RHEL, but the client won't go "without official support channels" even though I'm their official support channel anyway.

Oh, yeah: I've also got WinXP in a v1rtual machine on my workstation so I can play online poker and watch Netflix movies. I was really freakin' choked when the DOJ killed online real money poker, the bastards. I was making pretty okay money at Pot Limit Omaha there for a while.

 

I just ate most of a pizza and some pb&j bars for dessert and I wish I could finish the pizza but my truck isn't purple.

 

If you had ducks you could do it without a purple truck. Hamsters would also work if one of them was named Ethel and the number 1 appears in your street address.

 

There is a 1 in my street address but my Aunt was adopted and her hampster isn't African.

 

Sounds like Obama.