What journalspace Can Teach You About Business

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The rumors have been circulating for a few days, but it’s confirmed now: journalspace has gone down for good. Now, I didn’t use or really know about this site, but apparently it was a blogging site that provided personal blogs to anyone who wanted them, similar to Wordpress.com and Blogger.com.

In a nutshell, the website did not have a backup system: they used a drive mirroring system to duplicate any data coming into the site. In the most simple terms, as new data was created and sent into the database, the system created two separate, but identical, copies of the data. Most websites use a similar system as it provides a fail-over system in case one of the hard drives fails. Google uses a similar system to store multiple copies of its data in different places. What journalspace failed to do is have any other backup system. Think of it this way: What good does having two copies of the data do if the data is corrupt? Most companies, and many individuals, use a drive mirroring system as a first line of defense against failure. That is then supplemented by other systems, such as FTP storage and on and off-site storage. If journalspace had an off-site backup system in place, they might have gone offline for a day or two as the data is backed up. Now, because of their decisions, they seem to be shutting down the entire site. I don’t know how much this will cost the investors, but it is a needless waste of capital.

What You Can Learn:

Religiously back up your data– I can’t provide any specific advise for anyone here, but make sure you have plenty of backup systems in place. For me, that means daily images of my sites and a weekly and monthly off-site backup. If something happens to any of my sites, I can revert to a previous image or if that image is corrupt, I can easily grab an older backup of my site. In the latter case, I may lose a few days of data, but it’s not catastrophic. For my personal computer, I use a combination of Carbonite Backup, an internal backup drive, and an external backup drive.
Don’t Trust Just One Employee–It seems that journalspace had one employee that was responsible for all the data backup and architecture for the entire site. It’s always a bad idea to have a single point of failure. In this case, the employee was fired or laid off and retaliated by destroying some data as he left. The owners of journalspace speculate that he could have had something to do with the current problem. If journalspace had multiple database or DA employees, they would have served as a check and balance system, ensuring that no one inserted malicious code or damaged the system beyond repair.
Don’t Make Accusations–If you read the post on journalspace.com now, they openly accuse the fired employee of causing the most recent outage. Now, if I was the CEO and a fired employee had already caused damage after leaving the company, my first reaction would be the same. However, making this statement opens the company to liability if they are incorrect. Additionally, if this is correct, it doesn’t say anything good about the company. If your entire business model can be destroyed by one disgruntled former employee, then I don’t know if I would trust you to run a company I invest in…

Sometimes you have to make your own mistakes before you learn. However, this is one of those situations where you can learn quite a bit from someone else’s mistake. If you are a computer user, make sure you have, at the bare minimum, a backup drive. I would suggest using a backup drive and Carbonite or Mozy, two online backup systems. If you are a website owner and you use a commerical host, check into their backup systems. They should, at the very least, provide weekly off-site backups. If you run your own servers, you shold have drive imaging, and scheduled on and off-site backups. Though it is true that you can have too much life insurance, you simply cannot be too careful about your data.