Helping you sleep at night

By Bob North on 3 April 2009

Here's a thought that might save your life. Well, your career. It's all to do with that mundane task that's never quite important enough to do right now. Yes, it's the dreaded backup routine. Though today I'm concentrating not just on backups, but the equally important restore process.

So first off, ensure that your hardware has some redundancy. A RAID disk array is a must-have. Disks die all the time, and without notice. Make sure you have an alert setup to tell you when a disk has died, otherwise – after the first disk has died – you can be running under a false sense of security on the one remaining disk.

With the RAID in place for minute-by-minute protection, we now need to step back and protect against the issues that could require you to change hosting provider. These could range from a total machine failure, to the colo losing all their connectivity, or even going out of business. In these situations its important to already have an offsite backup of the site: by definition, you won't be able to go and take a backup when things go wrong.

So, how often do you backup your website? Monthly? Weekly? In the 'old days' when websites were pretty static brochureware, you could get away with a monthly backup, and after a restore it would be little hassle to redo any changes that might have been applied in the meantime. However with data driven websites you can't backup often enough – data is changing all the time - and with user-generated content you may not even be aware of it.

There are two ways to get a backup. You can Export your site, via the Layout Manager, or if you have multiple sites you can use a backup script to grab them all at once.

Once you have your backups, it's time to rehearse what you would do with them in an emergency. Prepare a machine (it can be a Virtual Machine) with a fully patched operating system and the latest version of neatComponents, and restore your backup into it.

The other thing to be aware of is that unless you can quickly change your DNS records to point traffic to the new server, your site will remain invisible to the world. So, make sure that your domains' DNS records are hosted somewhere different from your neatComponents server, and make sure the TTL is set to something low, say an hour. That way, after changing the DNS to point to the new server everyone will be looking at it within the hour.

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Feeling Agile

By Bob North on 23 March 2009

If you've ever studied computing at university you'll have come across some tedious methodologies like the 'Waterfall Model' or the PRINCE2 project management standard. One of the more recent entrants into the field is 'AGILE' development, and as the name suggests, it is all about getting results quickly, keeping the customer in the loop, and providing a working system as early in the development process as possible.

AGILE development is a team-oriented approach, with several developers working on a site at the same time, watching what each other is doing, and fixing issues as they arise. neatComponents provides an ideal platform for this type of working, as it is inherently multi-user for the site designers, with full page and record-locking, and it is quite happy for those developers to  be geographically dispersed. The rich permissions system allows the client to be shown parts of the solution as it is created, without the outside world seeing it too.

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