Server disk crash

This server’s old hard drive failed last week. “Did you have backups?” Yes, I did. “Had you tested your backups?” No, I hadn’t. Seems my backup routine did not have enough access to all the files that needed to be backed up, so restoring the server has been a bit of a task. But about everything is now more or less coming up. And at the same time I decided to get rid of the old static xstl pages and replace everything with just this blog. At least for now. I’ll write more on the restoration process a bit later…
So why did the backup not work completely? All of the servers I administer have a centralized backup location on one of the servers. There’s a raid 1 stack that receives all backups. The backup software is “flexbackup”, which quite nicely does backups of remote machines over the net. The problem was that I had decided to use the “backup” user account to do the backups, and of course this user did not have enough access to some of the more secure files. The lesson: add the backup user to the groups that have access to stuff that needs to be backed up. Eg: users, staff, www-data, zope, mysql. You get the idea. Also, after setting up the backups, take a look at /var/log/flexbackup (or wherever you’re saving the flexbackup logs) and look for “access denied” messages and see if those files and folders should be included in the backup. If they should, then you need to grant more access to the backup user account.