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Re:Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100... by Confusion on Friday December 11, 2009 @06:07PM (#990733)
Do you also test that your airbags work properly? I don't audit and test the safety measures on most of the equipment in my house: that's what I pay the supplier for and there'll be hell to pay when they screw it up. Similarly, I don't audit and test my disaster recovery procedures, because that is what I pay my hosting partner for.
Re:Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100... by klodolph on Friday December 11, 2009 @06:45PM (#990802)
"Reasoning by analogy"

The people who made your car were legally required to test your model of car by crashing it into another one and making sure the airbags work. This is also too expensive to test yourself. One does not modify an airbag system at all without retesting it.

Your hosting provider has no legal requirement to test their backup system. At best, they have a contractual obligation. And they don't know how to test recovering your site, because testing whether it works is a different process for each site. Additionally, it's cheap to test backup procedures. Most people have a spare computer somewhere (maybe not in the data center), and it should only take a few hours to restore a copy of your site. Once a year. For Chris's sake, you could probably do it in the background and put a movie on.

Re:Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100... by nomoresecrets on Sunday December 13, 2009 @12:45PM (#992906)
When you test airbags, you have to then replace them. This is possibly the worst car analogy ever :-)