Backups and online data

This past weekend has not been a good one for Mweb Business. On Friday, some misconfiguration, glitch or human error caused the loss of many clients’ hosted systems on Mweb’s virtual hosting platform. Clients were greeted with a message stating that their new/clean virtual machines were now up with a new IP address. And no data.

That will be a catastrophic loss for many clients. And for 2 reasons:

  • a problem at Mweb led to this data loss
  • many clients may have been under the assumption that their data was safe, or did not backup their data

I preach backup incessantly and for good reason. Your data is yours and yours alone. It is your responsibility alone. Even if you are using a 3rd party to do your backups, mistakes and issues do happen – you need to make sure that the backups are being done, that they are being done correctly and that the backup data can be restored.

The onus here was on both parties and I do feel for both parties. In Mweb’s case ( and considering that I have a very poor regard for them ), this may have been a slip of the finger, a glitch in the system or something innocuous.  I.o.w. a genuine issue or just bad luck.

From the client’s point of view, they should have been performing their own backups. Yes, the outage would have been an inconvenience, and in some cases a critical one, but at least they would have been able to recover from this. Mweb’s T&C’s stating they are not responsible for client data is scant compensation to those who have lost data.

There’s a lesson here that some will not see or simply ignore: backups are important and critical to your business. Make sure your backup system is working and in proper condition.

More details here:

http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=144811%3AMWeb-Business-outage-cause-Someone-pushed-the-wrong-button-

Massive MWEB Business data loss

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