Jeff Atwood writes one of the best programming blogs on the Internet, Coding Horror. His articles are an eclectic mix of good programming practice with oblique connections to current events and societal observations. That’s why it’s so shocking to learn that he lost his entire web site, backups and all yesterday because they were all stored on a single server at Crystal Tech.
Jeff is a pretty smart guy, this was a clear case of incompetence by his hosting provider. Had they actually been performing the service Atwood was paying for then this would not have been an issue. It looks like he’s going to be able to recover, but I’m sure it’s not the way he wanted to spend his weekend 13 days before Christmas.
The lesson here for the rest of us mortals is to remember that in the end we are responsible for our own data. This is incredibly important as more and more of our lives (both personal and professional) migrate to the cloud. Ronald Reagan’s famous quote about nuclear non-proliferation treaties comes to mind, “Trust but verify.”
Think I’ll be doing some verifying this weekend.
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