WebHostingTalk.com, a very popular community used by both consumers and business owners to review and advertise web hosting services, was hacked recently. The cracker deleted all database backups (including the remote backups). The earliest offline backup appears to have been from October 2008, and if you've ever had to run a forum you can probably understand how frustrating losing even a few days worth of posts can be for the members.
This got me thinking about how important offline backups are and why we should all be using them. Never assume your online backups are safe and be sure to take extra precautions when setting up a remote backup system. For example, your server shouldn't be able to connect to the remote backup server. Instead, the remote backup server should connect to the server to retrieve backups. This way, if your server is compromised, the cracker can't gain access to the remote backups!
I've had my fair share of experience with data loss over the past 15 years and I make it a point to backup everything. But I'll admit that I'm not doing enough to keep my offline backups up-to-date. This event at WebHostingTalk.com has reminded me just how important they are to a well-rounded disaster recovery plan.