Backups matter

I spent yesterday morning doing backups for a client who has offshore servers, lots of them, and wants to rationalize down to two servers each backing up to the other. In my opinion a utterly sensible way to go.

Its sad however that the ludicrous cost of data transfer in Australia forces so many people to go to offshore hosting. Still while Australia has a communications minister who barely understands smoke signals things may not improve. Perhaps I am getting a bit political there.

Anyway step one is clearly to make sure we have a reasonably current copy of all of his data ,before we actually move each of his many sites That way if something goes wrong the data is OK. Its data that costs the real money. Its measured in sweat one way or another. Its why I find data recovery actually satisfying.

I have a grill in the kitchen. Huge cast iron thing that I cook on at least 4 times a week. Anyway its a present from a grateful customer for recovering his wife’s PHD thesis from a dead hard drive. Of course she should have had a backup.. but anyway.. that was satisfying.

Anyway in the afternoon I went into town to look at a bicycle with one of the girls on our race team and her husband. She bought it. And then I went out to Thomastown to talk to my brother who has a business out there. My brother is the ideal candidate for a CRM. He is sitting on a business that could easily be worth millions.. turns customers away every day cos he is so disorganized is running a 2 person workshop that could easily employ 10 and loses invoices like they don’t matter. Really upsets me. He is really really good at what he does. Absolutely the best in Melbourne. But what he does not do is run a business. He needs someone to run the business for him while he does what he does well which is run a workshop. He even knows this. Getting him to actually do it is the problem

Todays jobs. Finish these backups. Have a look at which site to move first. Update the documentation on those sites. Do a couple of changes to website… We have a privacy policy for data I wrote somewhere.. I,ll put that up. Get ABOC test site installed . Security updates on PNserver. Follow up on a couple of customers.