One of our servers at ServerMatrix had to have an O/S reload. We requested that Red Hat Enterprise Linux be installed. We also requested not to format the second hard drive, as it contained our back ups. Here comes the bad news. I logged in as root, only to find our Red Hat 9 was loaded. But worst of all, the second hard drive had been formatted. All of our clients data is lost. :(

I am definately not thrilled...

What going on with these tech guys same happened to one of my friend at another datacenter!
Unplugging the server? requesting second hard drive and boom! everything is gone!

God bless all of us!

This may be like extreme cases. But definetly not acceptable.

Maybe wont be a good example but come to my mind at the first shot!:)SOME datacenter tech guys are like SOME doctors.
They all refer to a dead man as X
One more X. What about the family and all those people who love them.

God bless all of us!

Uh oh. And here I was thinking SM seemed a secure place to keep a database server. Not anymore.

You didn't make any offsite backups?

If you don't have a spare server,

put a 250 GB drive into your computer and download everything once every month. Its the worst solution, but it saved me in the early months of web hosting when I used to do it.

or get a cheap managed.com server with 2 hard drives :D

Use unison or rdiff-backup so you only download diffs of what has changed. Much more efficient than downloading everything. Run it nice'd in a crontab nightly to your home pc if thats all you can muster.

if my home pc is under broadband, no static ip, how can i do backup?

Wow, this is really bad :(

You don't need a static ip, you can run the client from your pc and pull from the server. URL for unison is
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
You'll want to use the -force flag to force it to sync only from the server to you. Unison runs on windows and unix.
Alternatively, you could just set up a cheap managed.com box for backups or sign up with people who offer cheap disk and bandwidth for backups.

What would have happened if the drive with your data on it went bad?
While SM might have made a mistake (mistakes DO happen) is the potential for complete data loss (and the loss of revenue as a result of that) worth skimping the $20 per month it would have cost you to back your data up? (This isn't meant to come off as sounding inflammatory, but is a question that all providers that don't do offsite backups should consider, imo)

-Raj Dutt

Yes one thing I have learned from this is that you should always have an outside backup. Always always have one.

Originally posted by nopzor
What would have happened if the drive with your data on it went bad?
While SM might have made a mistake (mistakes DO happen) is the potential for complete data loss (and the loss of revenue as a result of that) worth skimping the $20 per month it would have cost you to back your data up? (This isn't meant to come off as sounding inflammatory, but is a question that all providers that don't do offsite backups should consider, imo)

-Raj Dutt

Aboslutely Agree. It's too important not to, and a lesson people learn the hard way.

eLiTeGuRu, good luck with things, I hate hearing stories like that.

I have to say I am starting to get a little worried about SM/ThePlanet. I have had a good run until recently. We have several servers with them now, and finally decided to order one of their total control servers. The order went really well they gave me some great discounts, and proceeded to have the server setup within about 6 hours. I was very happy with their speed (I ordered over the phone which really helps speed things up). I had special partitioning requirements and they got these perfect.

I proceeded to start to configure the server and everything was going well. The only problem was that server required regular reboots due to it not responding at times. This was quite easy through the Total Control Interface, I thought this was a problem with the configuring I had done, so proceeded to try to fix it. I couldn't find any problem.

The problems seemed to have stopped, so I proceeded to start using the server. About a week ago their were network problems for over 12 hours! Some people could access the server fine, while others got nothing. It turns out that had network load balancing issues. I already had clients on this server I was starting to worry a lot that they wouldn't be clients for much longer.

I called ThePlanet on a regular basis, while half of them said there were no network issues, and other said there were still problems. It was quite frustrating. The Total Contorl Servers come with a 100% network uptime guarentee, and this had already gone below 99.9% uptime for the month.

They contacted me hours later saying most issues resolved, and that part of the problem was due to them assigning me IPs which belonged to a network load balancer, so they had to disable some of my IPs to resolve the problem. Of course I had name servers running on these IPs so they shutdown the name servers. By this stage my vision of the Total Control Servers had been shattered. I was thoroughly disappointed and had lost a lot of money and a about 1-2 weeks worth of configuration.

The good news and reason I am still (for now) with SM/ThePlanet is they provided me with the refund I requested in a timely manner and were very good about the issue. I am still quite happy wth their service most of the time, so we are still keeping serveral servers with them.

Now back onto the topic of backing up. We keep a backup locally in the datacenter and remotely in another datacenter. You should especially backup your data to a remote location if you are getting a OS reload, problems can always occur and it is not worth the risk.

With their large customer base, mistakes can happen :)

Yes, I can completely understand this and they handle most matters very well considering the number of customers they have. I still plan on staying them as they have great customer support even if they do make mistakes every now and then.

Ya, Me and guru are really upset, Since we lost all forum data after spending solid weeks working on it.