I was not a real strong believer of backups , cause i thought i am good to hard drives why would they act against me. And it turned out i was TOTALLY WRONG. Hard drives couldnt care any less if they were in a bad mood and it dawned on me like 6 months ago.

One night i am browsing my sites on my server and i see weird write permission denied errors , even for session data. Now i thought it was a simple glitch , so i went and did a reboot from my control panel provided by The Planet. Next thing i know , the server fails to restart. I put in a ticket and the great support people at the planet tell me that the BIOS isnt detecting any hard drive and i am like .. no no no , that cannt be so! After alot of effort by them they declared it was dead, nothing can be done. They went out of the way for me to check with techs if they can find a way to scrap off any data from the dead HD. But no luck! So i end up loosing about 5 GB of data on that server , with little or no backup. A lesson to be learned was there for me!

So they got the server back up for me with a new HD as soon as humanly possible for them. and the first thing i did was to buy a streamload.com account now known as mediamax.com then i went into my WHM (cPanel/WHN rox , Plesk Sux) and setup a periodic backup via FTP to streamload.com and since then i have been at peace. Atleast all the DB and files will be safe, the server config can be re-done with some pain, thats not a big deal.

So i suggest any of you who have dynamic websites or servers, getting mediamax/streamload account isnt a bad idea at all , even a free account will serve your purpose.

If you have 2 servers , you can swap the backups , backup server 1 on server 2 and vice versa. This way you dont even need a third party solution for backup. The chances of both servers getting kicked in the balls at the same time are really slim , unless goddess of bad luck loves you :)

I learned my lesson the hard way , i should have known better after being in this field for like 6 years now. I hope someone who reads this understand the importance of having a backup solution.