Sunday morning maintenance

As a Systems Engineer server maintenance and system administration just come naturally to me. I know what its like to loose a database of a message store on a email server and the pain it is to get these things back up and running. But without my backups and server maintenance schedule, recovering from a catastrophic lose would be impossible. I can’t stress the importance of making sure that you do backups and also make sure that when you do the backups you are able to restore them if need be.

Sunday is usually the day I spend doing my maintenance and checking to make sure the maintenance is working. Sunday is my play day so I can kickoff a backup and go off to do other things and stop back to check on it later. Its also a time when I look into testing other plug0ins, tweak my theme and all the stuff I want to do during the week but just don’t have the time. Before I actually apply any plug-ins or tweak anything on my live blog I have 2 or 3 “development” Word Press installs that I hack around with so that I don’t experience any downtime. Its also a good idea to try a restore your back up to one of these development installs to test the backup. These things are all part of your disaster recovery process.

If you spend a little time doing these things each week, when (not “if”) your server crashes or your Word Press install flakes out, you will come back and thank me for mentioning these things. It so much easier to recover, when you have a plan to recover.