The Twelve Steps of Backups

Friday, February 11, 2011 - 11:55
Follow these twelve steps, so that you might never stray from the path.
  1. We admit we are powerless against data loss - that our copies of copies of copies of files have become unmanageable.
  2. We have come to believe that Redundancy greater than a USB stick can help restore our sanity.
  3. We have made a decision to turn our programs and our data over to the care of Backing Shit Up as we understand it.
  4. We have made a searching and fearless inventory of our filesystems.
  5. We have admitted to Backing Shit Up, to ourselves, and to another system administrator the exact nature of our stupidity.
  6. We are entirely ready to have Backing Shit Up remove all these defects of intelligence.
  7. We have humbly asked Backing Shit Up to look after our data in future.
  8. We have made a list of all the files we have lost, and have become accepting of the fact that we never Backed Shit Up and it was our fault.
  9. We have suffered for our loss of such data wherever unavoidable, except when we happened to have Written Shit Down on the off chance as well.
  10. We continue to take a filesystem inventory and when we forget to Back Some Shit Up promptly admit it.
  11. We have sought through unstructured, differential and full backups to improve our conscious contact with Backing Shit Up as we understand it, reading the damn manuals so we can carry out Backing Shit Up properly.
  12. We have had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps; we have tried to carry this message to people who do not Back Shit Up, and to practice the principle of Backing Shit Up on all of our servers.

Comments

Anonymous (not verified)

Mon, 28/02/2011 - 04:04

thanks for this piece.