Re my old boss
Another display of utter tightwaddedness was that although the sites were hosted on site, there was no proper backup facility. One of the previous employees had knocked up a little program in VB which was put on the live server.

It was scheduled to start at midnight everynight, copy all the live sites across onto the email server and then quit again.

However, it crashed one night and didn't back anything up. then it was respawned the next night, crashed and didn't back anything up.

This went on for 8 months before the server had an embolism one Saturday night and died in a spectacular way, the drive went pop and all the sites were gone.

There were all the sites on the work-server, so it was just a case of uploading all the sites back onto another ancient hard-drive. However, any dynamic content in databases was gone. 8 months of news updates on sites, transactions etc..

There was a mad rush to get as many sites back online. Mainly those that had paid the most cash and were on the phone.

Some customers were so small time, they never noticed, even during the three months it took to get everything back online.

So, what did he do to make sure it didn't happen again? A selection of RAID arrays? Splash out on expensive backup software? An offsite mirror server?

No, he went out and bought an external 40Gb USB hard-drive. Last thing each day, he would plug it in, copy everything across, unplug it again and take it home.

He kept it up for maybe 3 days before he got bored.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Tue 28 Oct 2008, 19:52, Reply)