We just bought a new server to replace our external backup location. The websites from the Anarchist Federation Network have grown a lot in disk size with hundreds of thousands of posts and images. This means that the weekly backups of each site have also grown a lot and use more and more disk space.
Our current backup server is more than 10 years old with aging material. This was not a concern previously, because the server is not receiving any web traffic and is solely used as an external backup location. But recently we started having recurring issues with the disk being 100% full, causing backups to fail on our other servers. So an upgrade was required to add a new hard disk with 4 Terabytes of storage. The new backup server was also migrated to AlmaLinux like the rest of our servers.
Backup servers are often overlooked by web administrators because they’re paying money for something rarely used. But if something bad happens and you don’t have backups, you lose everything. In 2021, a major fire broke out in one of our data centers. Four of our servers went offline due to the fire, and one of them was completely destroyed (Server 3 hosting the forums). According to Reuters, millions of websites disappeared from the internet due to the fire, and many of them lost everything. Fortunately, the NGNM Tech Team already had a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) in place and our websites quickly went back online without any data loss. But this was not the case for others who did not have backups, and some websites permanently disappeared. This event confirmed once again the importance of having a DRP and off-site backup location.
The Servers Monitoring Dashboard is now showing the real-time hardware data from the new backup server. We have now completed the integration of 6 out of 10 servers in this dashboard and we plan to integrate the rest of our servers as soon as possible.
