13
That week in Austin when my whole network got hit by a ransomware attack at 3AM
Logged in Sunday morning to start some work and every file on our server was .encrypted. Had 12 clients relying on that server for their small biz websites. No backups for 4 days because the automated backup script failed silently. Lost 6 years of client data. Wasted $2k on a recovery service that got back maybe 30% of it. Now I check my backup logs every single morning. Any of you guys had a silent failure like that ruin your week?
3 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In3 Comments
ivan_mason16d ago
Backups that silently fail are the worst kind of tech trap.
6
morgan_bailey9316d ago
A buddy of mine had the same thing happen and adding a simple cron job that emails me daily with backup status has saved me more than once. It takes five minutes to set up but catches failures before they pile up. Now I get a little summary each morning even if everything ran fine.
1
milessmith1d ago
Did you set it up to email to your personal address or use something like a Slack webhook? I tried the email route first but kept missing it in my inbox, so I switched to piping the cron output into a simple Telegram bot instead. It sends me a quick "backups OK" or "backups FAILED" message every morning, and now I notice failures within minutes instead of discovering them weeks later.
4