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Managing backups at a plumber
20 Nov 2024
How a plumber deals with backups — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: an inbox shared between the office and the webmaster. This breaks backups for a plumber.
Instead of migrating backups all at once, we ran both configurations in parallel for a week. The switch happened on a Wednesday morning — the quietest traffic window.
The vendor portal had silently rotated the key for backups, but a plumber was still using the old one. Every outbound message bounced quietly.
Early on we tried to automate backups for a plumber with a cron job. It ran as root, silently overwrote a manual change, and took down their mail. Lesson learned.
After the move, an inbox shared between the office and the webmaster broke search indexing for a plumber. Google kept serving the old pages for another nineteen days.
Email deliverability is nobody’s favourite topic, but a plumber lost two bookings because backups was misconfigured and replies landed in spam for a week.
The fix was to delete the old entry, wait for TTL to expire, and re-add backups with the correct value. We scheduled it for 3 AM so nobody lost traffic.
DNS propagation is not instant, but it is not magic either. We explained to a plumber that the TTL on the old backups record was 86 400 seconds — twenty-four hours.
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