Ok, I’m confused. This is 2009, correct? The web is 19 years old. Why do companies go into production at this point in time without ANY form of tested data backup plan? I’ve seen two reports since the first of the year of companies folding due to the complete loss of all user data.

The first was the blogging platform Journalspace in January (they have since been picked up by a new owner…hopefully they have heard of off site backups). Journalspace was using RAID as their backup. The thought was that if one drive fails, we have a copy on drive two, so all will be good. Fine in theory…if the only failure that occurs is a hardware one. In Journalspace’s case, the data was wiped via software. If you delete a file on purpose from drive one, it will be deleted as well from drive two. A backup strategy, RAID is not.

Now we have the social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia. Today they announced that their attempts to recover from a database server crash have been unsuccessful and all data has been lost. In this case, instead of not having a backup strategy at all, they just had one that didn’t work. I would now consider them poster children for testing your backup strategies.

Am I missing something? As a user of services like these, these should serve as examples of why you shouldn’t trust your service providers and do your own backups. Backup your WordPress or Blogger blogs. Backup your del.icio.us and digg links. What methods do you use to backup data that service providers store for you? Let us know in the comments!