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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

Let me get this right: the guy who ran a site whose entire purpose is to make fun of other people's poor programming practices has no external backups?

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I think you're thinking of Daily WTF. Jeff's blog is/was just a programming blog.

He also frequently said he was the world's worst coder, so...

You're right, I often confused Jeff's blog with Daily WTF. Jeff might be self-effacing, but at the same time he also dispenses a lot of programming and software development advice.

Conferring advice does not imply a claim of authority. If I give someone directions to a coffee shop in New York, the recipient should not infer that I am an expert on New York, traffic grids, coffee, etc.

If, on the other hand, you set up a kiosk labeled "NYC Directions" on a corner, I'd assume you knew more about getting around the city than your average bear.

If we are describing formal logic, then fine. (Although actually, not even fine there, really. There is a fairly powerful theory of "conversational implicature" that I studied once upon a time: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/ It tries to tease out some of what makes conversation (which is gappy and missing a lot logically speaking) as effective as it is.)

If we are describing human conversation, then - um - I call bullshit. If you give advice, you most certainly imply (for a suitably non-formal definition of 'imply') authority, knowledge, etc. about the matter you give advice on.

Your example - or the way you spin it out - is very odd. If you give directions to some coffee shop, we should be able to assume that you know where the coffee shop is. I suppose at the very least we should be able to assume that you believe that you know where the coffee shop is. The guy gave advice on backing up - he passed along someone else's advice, and said he it was essential advice. The relevant switch for your analogy would be asking him to be able to describe the code in rsync or dd or whatever. Nobody is doing that. They're simply pointing out that he didn't practice what he preached (with various degrees of unfortunate serves-him-right schadenfreude, but never mind that for the moment).

Answering a question implies a claim of authority. Offering advice on the internet (unsolicited) is the equivalent of building a freaking billboard with directions to the coffee shop.

Well, he did make sure to tell us to shut up, stop what we're doing and make a back-up. Because he knows things, you see:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:2HHNAk2SB6EJ:www.codingh...

The site says he has a backup, right? So it sounds like he ... does have a backup.

Yes, except he doesn't. Hence his tweets and his own recent question on stackoverflow about recovering his content from internet caches.

Ouch. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I guess he is just fucked.

Well, he was right.

Jamie Zawinski said to shut up, stop what you're doing and make a back-up. Jeff simply spread Jamie's message to a wider audience, rather than claiming it as his own.

Actually, it was JWZ who said that.

Amusingly, he also quoted jwz as saying "The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it." This incident appears to be proof positive of that.

Well - he is human though he can have a new site now called "backup horrors". All kidding aside - this is horrible. How many people validate their backups on a regular basis? (even once a year)

Automatic validation is done through every backup (and I have my guys do a review of the logs from the nightly cron procedures). Once a month we test our restore procedures.

This is SOP in the real world.

Yup jokes aside. If you are not doing external backups and checking it at least once a month, you are doing it wrong. You can blame your host as much as you want, its equally your fault.

I learned it the hard way.

As I said in another thread, if you regularly refresh your development environment from your production backups, you get them verified "for free" and your ops people get plenty of practice, you never have to run a "DR exercise" to know you can.

No it's not.

It should be. It might even be in some of the plans. But most of the time it doesn't happen.

Ditto. Also, for the stuff I don't automatically validate I run a script to check file sizes for sanity.

I don't think that was the main purpose of his blog. I'd point you to some of his posts supporting this, but... :)

"Coding Horror experienced 100% data loss at our hosting provider, CrystalTech.

I have some backups and I'll try to get it up and running ASAP!"

Read his newer tweets - his backups were just copies on the same server; they are gone as well, and now he's resorting to using internet caches to restore his content.

[facepalm]

There are tools to retrieve data from Internet caches, like Warrick - http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/warrick.html .

Programming is not system administration. As a programmer, I learned long ago that I can pay people to keep systems up, and that they do better than me and cost less than me.

Handling a failing disk is the job of a sysadmin, not a programmer.

I've learned never to trust anyone else with your critical data. I try and avoid doing sysadmin tasks (I hate it) and I pay for it but I make sure the backups are working and at least some copy is under my direct control.

Sometimes I'm extremely shocked at how cavalier professionals are at maintaining your data and I've worked with plenty.

If your a one-man show, you have to develop enough sysadmin skills for critical tasks such as offsite backup. I do have sympathy for Jeff, I'm certainly not laughing at him. Hope this is a strong message to the many out there not doing it right.

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