Having been witness to a few catastrophic data loss events in my life, I realize that I have to have a data backup in order to sleep at night. When I moved from a personal server (sitting in a corner) to a hosted solution, part of my arrangement was data backup/restore and basic disaster recovery solution implemented as part of my hosting costs. I hope you have something like that as well. But if not, I found this: http://www.xcloner.com It clones your entire LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) configuration for backup and possible restoration, either on your existing, or a new server. It's free, only support costs money. So if you're handy with software, and don't mind reading a little... Cheers! -- Smug

I do not have a disaster plan besides certain codes ill throw in dropbox just incase

Thanks Smug! It happened to me last fall.. GRRRHH not to mention hard drive died on my MBPRO however managed to get everything.. I've been paranoid ever since. Thanks for the product review I'll read more into it.

My DRP is with Carbonite, it doesn't help with a LAMP setup, but it does keep my source code safe :)

Good things to think about. thanks @Smug @mysps I've had 2 MBPRO hard drives fail. I feel ya!

My MBPro hard drive died last March. You won't believe the number of 'Time Machine' disks I have now, lol! I was just pondering the 'enterprise' thinking I'm heading towards. It won't just be me and my stuff... Quite possibly several hundred/several thousand folks will be depending on my infrastructure. Of course, data integrity is tantamount. But also, reconfiguration can sometimes take days to get right. An 'outage' doesn't have to be data loss... It means people can't work for 'whatever' reason. I'm just lining up resources in case my stuff blows up. What will it take to get back up? How long does it take to get back up, and what steps need to be accomplished in what order to mitigate this... Fortunately for me, my arrangement with Network Solutions gives me a bit of a leg up. But I still want to have things mapped out. Not only for my own peace of mind, but also as a selling point for my clients... (We're dual homed, and if we have an outage we're up within x hours, etcetera...) Cheers! -- Smug

yeah im thinking of removing my optical disk and replacing it with a backup hard drive.. i honestly don't use it... also when i did copy things over i used this awesome mac app: Carbon Copy Cloner -- new drive - upgraded lion mountain - all of the settings from that old hard drive. http://www.bombich.com/download.html

Thank you @Smug! LA

Multiple backs, many hard drives, every couple of hours. Worked in the hosting industry for years, people would call and say they got hacked, no backups, business lost. BACK UP! Do it, no now, stop what you are doing and do what the good gentlemen say above. Go.... Do what they guys say above, why you still reading this? Get a back up regime in order.

Thanks guys for the info, I had been wondering about backing up. I work on an iMac and save ALL my files on a small external drive. I am not computer savy (most of the terms above are alien to me), where would one start when thinking about backing up? Cheers, Farcat

Thx for sharing! I've a small NAS which I use to back up my home/office macs but on february I plan to go BT "self hosted" so I'll have a look into it.

If you're not running a self hosted server, any good backup app would do. I'd start with the built in 'Time Machine'. If you're not running your own server, then BT is hosting your apps, and you (and your customers) should be covered by BT's disaster plan. The bottom line is getting back online after a catastrophic problem as fast as possible with no data loss, be that server or development machine. Cheers! -- Smug