Well, it had to happen. I finally got my new site up and planned to restore the blog posts to the new site. My backup files from various past sites were all in place – I had setup a backup script to dutifully collect the data monthly (I didn’t update the sites all that often), and also clean up after itself and only keep three months of backups.
The script ran, the backup files appeared and automatically cleaned themselves up after 90 days. When I first ran it I verified that the files were complete – I didn’t restore them anywhere, but the blog text was there. Success! Add it to cron on my desktop and let it run.
And run. And run. And run. Unattended. For the past couple years.
I had been lax and wasn’t blogging much so I let my SquareSpace site go away a year ago. Recently I decided to resume my ramblings..er, um, blogging, so I installed WordPress on my site and went looking through the backups.
The good news, my cron job continued to work dutifully backing up all the blog posts. Except when I canceled my SquareSpace account, it continued to “backup” the site – except this time the files it saved were essentially “the site does not exist” messages. (Insert sad face here…) Thankfully I was able to restore some of the older text using Archive.org and I’m still combing through other old sources. But much of it is a loss.
So, what did I learn (or re-learn) from all this?
- A single copy of a backup is not a backup. Use the “Three/Two/One” rule.
- Don’t cleanup archives when it’s not necessary. The backup files were small enough (less than a megabyte after compressions), so I could have kept many years in couple gigabytes on my server.
- Keep track of services and the processes associated with it – I didn’t need to keep the backup script running after cancelling the service. This didn’t have a real expense associated with it, but how often have we looked at our budget and realized that we’ve continued to pay for something well after we stopped using it.