Server Harddrive Addition :: Sunday, March 7, 2004

[Jason]

This post will be emailed to all clients within the next few minutes.  Feel free to post any questions or comments here.

-----------------------------------------
March 6, 2004

Greetings from Charlottezweb. I hope the new year is treating everyone well. 

I wanted to make all clients aware of a server upgrade that I am scheduling to occur this weekend. 

We are adding an additional 80gig harddrive to complement the current drive in our machine.  Once the datacenter installs the drive, I am going to work with our tech support to configure it as a backup drive.  Currently hosting clients are responsible for maintaining their own backups at all times. This will STILL continue to be the case.  As a rule of thumb, it is always important to keep current backups of your sites in case of disasters.  In fact, you may want to do a backup today as a precautionary measure.  They have been instructed to not touch the current drive in any way, but it may be smart to be prepared just in case.

However, as soon as this drive is configured, we will be backing up specific data in the event of any hardware failures.  Should a problem arise, we will be more prepared to quickly restore our sites than a lot of our competitors, though this is definitely not a reason to not keep your own current bakups.  I can't stress that enough. 

Customers who have Charlottezweb.com design and maintain their websites do not need to worry about backups as much because I personally backup your sites in multiple locations everytime any alterations are made.

Back to the addition, this install should be very quick and possibly invisible to you but will result in downtime because they have to power down the box to install the new drive.  This could mean up to 2 hours of downtime, though I don't expect that full amount to be used.  Generally, it should be about 15-30 minutes tops if all goes well.  Because of this inevitable outtage, I have scheduled this install to occur between the hours of 12am-6am EST tonight so it will be less visible for most of our clients.  I understand that this is midday to some of our overseas clients, but the large majority is located here and we are not expecting this to take as long as it is being allotted.  All in all, this will be of a great benefit as an insurance policy should the need ever arise.

Should you need to reach me during the outtage when Charlottezweb.com (and my main email is down), you can email jason@charlottezwebhelp.com.  I can often be reached on AIM:  charlottezwebcom and will try to stay up to make sure everything goes smoothly.

At this particular moment, I have been told that this will be done tonight after midnight and before 6am EST tomorrow.  They are aiming for a time around 2-3am EST Sunday morning, though this is only an estimate.  Should this time be pushed back or otherwise altered, I'll update this thread.

Thank you for your continued support.

Kindest Regards,
Jason Saunders
jason@charlottezweb.com

[Jason]

This addition was completed successfully this morning with no problems.  I witnessed the start of the process shortly after 4am but wasn't awake to see the return.  According to server uptime stats, the site was back up shortly after 5am.  In all, the server was down for right around 1 hour which was more than I was expecting, but half of their allotted time.

Regards,
Jason

[Jason]

March 10, 2004
The following post will be duplicated in its own thread:

To expand on this backup issue, the server is now incrementally backing up all account data on the following days:

Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

What this means is that ALL of your account data is being backed up on these days incrementally.  This means that any files that are changed between those days will be backed up, otherwise, the current files will remain.  This is less stressful on the server as it will know exactly what files have been changed since the last update and will backup those specific files.  This should mean that at any given point our backup drive will contain the latest current data from the previous backup day of the week. 

In the event that you have any severe problems with your account (such as accidental deletion of files, loss of data on your local machines, etc) you can contact us to restore or provide the files you need to recover.  Though most hosts currently charge for this, we will be willing to assist you as needed as long as the demand is manageable.

As always, you should always keep your own backups of your current files and settings when applicable!

Best regards,
Jason