Webair hosting failed hard drive
 

I have been told this morning that my servers HD is being cloned and all of my sites are down. I am pretty nervous right now since my programmer did a ton of work off of my server in the past couple of months and its impossible to recover alot of stuff I have done the past 4 years. I am crossing my fingers since they tell me unfortunately I didnt have backups enabled. I am prepared for the worst but hopefully they can recover my data. This may be a huge loss for me if not recovered. I may have to start all over folks and that would be catastrophic for me.

Not having backups is insane. I can't believe that people still manage to fuck up on such a necessary task.

I had failed HDD to on webair and they managed to recover data and to make it work enough time to copy them to new drive.Good luck.

The lesson to be learned, especially for someone in your situation, make backups. You can automate that so you do not even need to think about it.

Good luck, but either way, start doing backups. And don't just rely on your host's version either. $.02

I agree I was just about to upgrade my server since I just launched my site. I waited too long. I am an idiot.

Best of luck.. if the HDD spins its usually recoverable. Even if it doesn't spin there are options depending whether the failure is electrical or physical.

Those backups with webair get expensive with the more data you have...I was paying an extra 100 a month...But then I got an external hard drive....It feels MUCH better knowing that my life's work isn't on a company's server in the Phillipines.

backup + redundancy + backup redundancy + redundant backup redundancy ftw

I have backups for all my content and webpages. Its the affilate program and blogs that will be fucked. Having to rebuild my affiliate program would be starting over.

Yeah...that's gonna suck for sure.

Sorry to hear that, but if you had backups not enabled then you should do backups by yourself, at least from time to time...

let this thread be a reminder to everyone to check if they have backups on their boxes

The cheapest way to do it is keep an offline backup at your house.

Jay,

I'm really sorry to hear you're in this predicament, and I surely hope the Webair techs can manage to recover your data.

However, aside from the obvious benefits of off-site backups, it is extremely important that any servers you have implement a RAID configuration, so that one disk dying never means immediate downtime. This is something they should have already suggested/setup for you, imho.

If it is critical and they can't get it, there are places that can get data off the deadest of drives.

Why dont you have RAID? Setup for drive mirroring and if one of them dies, the other one is ready with the same data.

Jeuss Christ, man, backup service with Webair is only like $5 a month!

WTF is wrong with you?

Not necessarily. :winkwink:

The drive you drove down to that one recovery place for me was a total failure, even after they spent over a month trying to pull the data off. I do appreciate you going out of your way for me though, that was not required on your part.

I learned the hard way that backups are the most important thing you can have when running an online business. I try to ensure that I have backups both on the hosts end, and my end.

The failed drive I had years ago cost me AT LEAST 100 websites. I was able to recover ZERO data and had no backups on my end. As a result, I had hundreds of sites drop that I was not able to bring back online. I was willing to pay the data recovery company the $3,000 or whatever it was, but even they were unsuccessful in pulling any data for me.

Needless to say it was the worse thing to happen to me since being in business, but also taught me one of my most important lessons.

Though I blamed the host for the longest time I have come to realize that HD failure is just something that happens and nobody is really to blame in most cases. Although using old drives increases your chance of this happening. Be smart, get backups, even if you have never had issues before.

:2 cents:

Depending of course on how much data you need to backup. They don't keep a room full of free servers to backup terabytes of data for their customers at $5/month. I spend hundreds of dollars on backups each month, on top of my local backups.

No it isnt. They charge price per gig, so it depends on how much data you have.

I paid around $50 monthly and I dont have a lot of sites.

Im not gonna chime in, because you already know.


I hate buying 2 drives for everything i store, but i keep hearing stories like this one, that reassures me on why i do it.


Hope things work out for you dude.

Yep, I have that too with Webair.

$5 for the first gb then an additional $10 per gb if my memory serves me correct.

Good advice. If you're not doing a full backup at least once a month somewhere other than with your host, you're crazy.

Highway robbery if that's the real rate but then again this is something most hosts charge too much for. It's been that way for as long as I can remember.

It's $5 for the first 50gb then $0.50 per gig there after.

I believe that was recently changed and unless you bring it up you will continue to pay the old price.

Sucks. Sorry to hear.

you don't know WTF you're talking about...Backup is priced per gig.

Wrong again.

that sucks bro

Webair contacted me to tell me Im fucked. I guess you get what you pay for with a hosting company like WEBAIR.

i lold

http://i54.tinypic.com/2casm1.jpg

Dude, that sucks

I put everything on a 2tb external now

Sorry to hear man :(

RAID is for intended for maintaining up-time / availability ... it is NOT for data backup.

Recovering data from RAID, even if it's a basic mirror setup, is no sure thing...

If the RAID controller (admittedly, they're much better these days) goes bad, both drives can be corrupted. Also, if the replacement drive is somewhat different / flaky, rebuilding the RAID may not go well - at best, it will just take a lot longer, but at worst, the good drive(s) could be corrupted too.

For those on a tight budget, an automated nightly backup to a spare drive on the server / local network is a far better approach than RAID. This is a common approach - while I'm not a big fan of it, it's light-years better than using RAID, which to reiterate, is not backup.

More ideal are the various managed backup services that many hosts offer - doing backups right takes effort so it will add some noticeable cost. Be sure that databases are backed up too - most hosts these days have a clue and do so by default, but best to verify to avoid nasty surprises later.

Ron

raid does not help file system corruption. Raid is not the god send, sure it helps but its not the fix all. I have seen way to many raid systems fail.

another webair success story.

Drives should be raided

RAID is not a substitute for backups

RAID for resiliency
Backups for data safety

You need both

quoted for truth :2 cents: