Are most of you backing up your drives on a daily or weekly basis... or are you not backing them up at all?

What's a good price to pay for having someone back up the hard drive/s on your server on a daily/weekly basis?

Also, have any of you actually experienced a harddrive failure which resulted in losing all data..... and not being able to recover it?

Everyone should do backup, but maybe you should start a poll.
As you mentioned a hard drive failure: most loss of data is not from hardware failure but from human errors.

We have been backing up our servers twice a week via tape, but are moving toward systems that are capable of IDE and SCSI RAID for redundancy.

Although, both technologies have their pros and cons, we will continue to provide tape backup for servers that house certain types of clientele.

Sully

While I would love to be able to backup my server nightly, I am unable to do this because of bandwidth constraints. I have a Cobalt with no tape drive, so I have it scheduled to backup on to my home computer once weekly. If I feel a need to back up the hd (before applying a major patch or something), I do so.

Backing up your server is a must. Especially for web hosts. I mean, you have clients who count on you to have that backup whenever a problem occurs and their files are lost or corrupted.

If you only do this after a patch has been installed, then you are taking a risk for sure. Why? Well, most of the time files are lost due to users accidently deleting files and not hardware failures.

Oh yes, we do backups nightly. :cool:

I particulary don't understand this sentence:

Originally posted by Sully
We have been backing up our servers twice a week via tape, but are moving toward systems that are capable of IDE and SCSI RAID for redundancy.

A quite common misunderstanding. RAID and backup have nothing in common:
RAID = minimizing downtime/maximizing performance
backup = a failback if something happens

We are running backups nightly, weekly, and monthly to seperate hard drives. We don't do full mirrors of the drives, but instead backup all files that are important. So if a hard drive fails or the data is corrupted, we just do a fresh OS install and then unzip the proper files to the proper places and reboot.