This afternoon I brought a new web server online. This state-of-the-art server has much more memory, more hard drive that we’ll ever use, an Intel dual-core processor, and a few other nice features. While the fact that it is much faster is probably masked to everyone on the Internet because that access is limited by the speed of the internet, processes will finish more quickly and the system should feel less “sticky”.

The other thing that got well tested today was the backup and recovery process. I was able to take the daily backup, restore that on the new server, and have the new server up and running in less than an hour. I’m quite happy that the backup and recovery process was sufficiently comprehensive and worked well. About 3 a.m. every morning the system makes a backup of all the user software and data and pushes that backup to a different computer here. That computer keeps a week’s worth of backups. Every Saturday morning the backup is also pushed to my iMac Mini computer where it is written to a 2gb memory stick. From there I take it over to my credit union and put that in our safe deposit box, exchanging it for an older memory stick. I think there are enough backups that I should always be able to recover from a problem.

At work we’ve been looking at a new set of web services now available from Amazon Web Services (the same company that brings us Amazon dot Com and Amazon One Click!). One of their services is storage which is very inexpensive. My next step with this system is to link the backups to the Internet disk storage at Amazon Web Services. I only pay for the bandwidth to push the data into the storage. There’s no cost for the storage except to push the data there or to pull it back. I think this would be a good addition to the backup and recovery process.

So, the new server is up and running. Hopefully everything on the server is running the way that it used to work. It’s a nice Saturday afternoon!