I am sure there are some Linux administrators who believe that working on Linux means stability. Sometimes bad things just happen and it is always good to have precautions in place for these moments. This article provides sound advice on how to plan for disaster recovery on a system using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl).

I make my living building custom databases with web interfaces for biotechnology companies. These are MySQL and Perl CGI applications, running under Linux, and every one of them is different. Disaster recovery planning for these applications has consisted of routine tape backups of all the software and data, a bunch of ReadMe files, and having me around to put the pieces back together if something breaks—and things do break… power supplies, disk drives, RAID controllers, you name it. Recovery means we fix or replace the hardware, reinstall Linux, restore the apps from tape, and then stitch everything back together.