Sunday, March 31, 2013

3rd Annual World Backup Day & What's in reddit's Backup This Week



"I just think it would be for the good of everyone to have a reminder to save all your cherished pictures, videos and other important data to somewhere secure."
Two years ago, some reddit users decreed that March 31st should be World Backup Day, The idea took off, WorldBackupDay.com was launched, and now it's hopefully on its way to joining the ranks of smoke detector batteries, oil changes, and doctor's checkups. You can find more information as well as exclusive deals & offers from sponsors Crashplan & Backblaze at WorldBackupDay.com.

Also don't forget to check your backup and restore procedures for all the things that you don't want to lose, like Minecraft serverBitcoin wallet, and videography work.

At reddit HQ our daily backup job takes about 5.5 hours to complete. After compression, our daily backup size grows by roughly 200MB each day. We back up roughly:

  • 270GB of comments
  • 70GB of links
  • 240GB of link votes
  • 300GB of comment votes
  • 400GB of "other"
In the last week, we've backed up the following:
  • 32 comments containing "hard drive fail"
  • 17 references to "the goddamn batman"
  • 3 uses of the phrase "does a bear shit in the woods?"
  • 128 comments about a "horse sized duck"
  • 54 claims of "Baby, you got a stew going!"
  • 16,507 comments containing "wtf"
  • 2,463 invocations of "'murica"
  • 1,954 looks of disapproval

Especially with all the mayhem of April Fool's around the corner (not that we're planning on doing anything special), make sure you review your backup plans and check your restores.