You may notice that commenting is currently disabled, and many old Coding Horror posts are missing images. That's because, sometime early on Friday, the server this blog is hosted on suffered catastrophic data loss.
Aside from the bandwidth issue, consider something like http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2397 for the future 
The link to your Visual Studio Settings is also still broken. That one should be easy to recover?
In my job, there has been 100% turnover in our IT dept within the last 6 months. We are all new and there is absolutely no documentation from the previous regime. There were many hands in the pot and by pot I mean server room. We have systems in various racks that we don’t even know the purpose of. Anyhow, being that no one really knows exactly how everything is set up, when we had a server crash recently it was catastrophic. Apparently the automated backup was disabled and we lost quite a bit of data and had to go back to a month old tape backup. SO yea, I feel your pain on this one. Since you mentioned gambling, go to http://www.wildcatgamblers.com if you want to suck at gambling less. That’s a free tip 
I feel you pain!
Thanks for the post.
I for one am a huge backup freak. I have a RAID 1 array for my desktop pc and still keep all of my data backup on both external hard drives and internal hard drives put into racks. I would go nuts if I would lose my data.
Regards,
George of http://webhostingforacent.com/?v=g
@George Wait, you’re a backup freak and rely on multiple copies in a single location? No remote backups? What if there was a fire?
Hey,
A bunch of users on Reddit decided that there should be more awareness around backups and especially the upkeep of backup restores. This has cumulated in designating March 31st as World Backup Day. (http://www.worldbackupday.net)
Yeah, the holiday is a play off of April Fools and to “preempt” any pranks or hard drive failures. Currently the site is just a single page but will hopefully expand soon to be more comprehensive.
Checkout our twitter feed @WorldBackupDay (http://twitter.com/WorldBackupDay) and our facebook group or blog about the importance of backing up and checking your data restores.
I have 3 VPSs (little servers). Two in different US data-centres, and one in Australia (where I live). Total cost ~$50 / month. (I use prgmr.com and crucial paradigm.)
I replicate everything that I care about (e.g. code, web-sites, mail) across my home computers, my work computers and these VPSs, using git.
As a bonus, it keeps a complete history of my work, and compresses it; and it’s lightning fast. I use it for mail, because it’s faster and better than IMAP.
No need to back up movies that you downloaded off bittorrent, you can download them again. Just back up your code and data. Go, make yourself some off-site backups scattered around the world, and do it now!
I also publish nearly all of this data (my code) on the web as a side-effect of committing it to my servers whenever I make any changes.
I don’t really want to be nasty, as you’ve repented already I can see… but if you’re operating a major web-site and don’t have multiple off-site backups on several different servers scattered around the world, then it’s hard for me to take anything else you might say seriously. This guy didn’t back up his community web site - so what credibility do you have with anything technical? Backup is like the fundamental most important thing you need to do with any project or service, since it’s inevitable that your systems will die sooner or later. My projects won’t vanish unless both Australia and the United States are nuked into oblivion at the same time. I better put some other backups in Antarctica or Africa or somewhere for extra security! Also, it costs almost nothing to make full incremental off-site backups.
I’m a huge fan of Veeam on windows. They have a nice linux client as well, that’s free. I haven’t tested it.
For my physical linux. I keep a 2nd drive btrfs formatted inside the machine. Then I rsync to it and take a snapshot. It’s super easy to maintain. I usually rsync important stuff offsite.