ASP Experts » backup

Source-controlled database backups

Editor — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 01:31:00 +0000

I’m not very satisfied with traditional database backup solutions. It seems like almost no progress was made since SQL Server 6.5 (at least for the built-in tools). They are still outputting monolithic binary backup files that only do the job if the only thing you expect from backups is the ability to recover from catastrophic failures. I expect more, but before I explain, we need a disclaimer: I am no expert of database backup and may very well miss some crucial points or some aspects of the current state of the art. The solution exposed in this post is the result of my own experiments and has no pretense at exhaustiveness or even reliability. It’s something I use on my own simple projects, and no more. Database backups are serious business…(read more)

How the IIS SEO Toolkit Saved My Butt

Editor — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:16:48 +0000

Ok, it wasn’t necessarily my ass that was saved, but it was years worth of images which were important to me! As I wrote yesterday , my blog’s hosting server had a hard-drive failure effectively wiping out my virtual machine, taking my blog down with it. Fortunately, I was able to get back up with a static archive of my site provided by Rich Skrenta, but I was missing all my images and other content (code samples). As Jeff mentions, I have learned the hard way that there are almost no organizations spidering and storing images on the web. Keep in mind that the images are not just mere eye candy. In many cases, they serve to illustrate key concepts: “ As you can see in the screenshot above, if the screenshot were still to exist, but through the…(read more)