The weird part is that you didn't mention the 400 pound gorilla in the room. ("I've been thinking about this for a long time, but it really hit home recently when...")
To my mind, that's why the post seems odd or passive aggressive. (It's a relatively short post as well. It just feels clipped somehow. The reader inevitably says, "What's not here?")
The web has more than enough content that feels stale after a week. Better to aim for something with a slightly longer shelf life.
But I do like his idea. So I appreciate that he omits pointless personal details and just sticks to the meat of the article.
When a writer expects me to read a bunch of self-indulgent cliche boilerplate I usually hit the back button.
No, because restores wouldn't have helped Jeff Atwood. You can backup a database onto the same server that hosts the database, and still successfully restore it later.
We should instead be talking about the concept of Continuity of Business. Decide how important it is for your data to continue to be available (constant availability vs. several days downtime vs. don't care if it disappears entirely?), then make a plan that gives you that availability.
What I'm describing isn't necessarily complicated. For example, I keep all my backup data (photos, music, etc) on a USB drive. Every morning it's rsynced to a hot spare. Every few weeks, I swap the spare with another one in a safe deposit box at the bank. (This means that we can recover from both immediate accidental deletions, and also ones that we don't catch for a few days, and disasters like theft or fire). I check every few days to make sure the drives are still working, and my wife knows how to switch the drives and has a key to the safe deposit box, just in case something happens to me.
Anyway, we feel that these are appropriate steps for protecting the data that we don't want to lose. But the important point is that everyone should make a plan that's appropriate for them.
"If you’re running a web service, you need to be able to show me that you can build a reasonably recent copy of the entire site, in a reasonable amount of time, on a new server or servers without ever accessing anything that was in the original data center."
We're tech types, but e.g. I know a programmer who never backed up his laptop (with important stuff) because he'd never had a hard drive go bad on him. You'll never guess what happened...
The hard part is getting 'normal' people to back up. It's really hard. They have all their data/documents on that laptop, and all the digital photographs from the first 18 months of their baby's life or whatever, but if you advise them to back up, you sound like some crazy lady who throws cats at people in the street.
Time Machine is the solution: everyone gets it (at least the normal people I introduced it to).
that's probably why companies such as dropbox are doing so well. making backups/restores easy is sweet.
(ps - thanks superduper! http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription... "heroic system recovery for mere mortals")