Despite Being A Cash-Strapped Startup, Never Skimp On This
I’ve written before about how to handle startup advice. One of the more common pieces of advice is anecdotal evidence from someone’s previous startup in one of two forms:
The Causal Statement: Despite all our cash challenges, we never skimped on <fill-in-the-blank>.
The Regretful Statement: If only we hadn’t skimped on <fill-in-the-blank>, things would have been much different.
The problem is that there is no consistency in how founders fill in the blank. It’s all over the map. If you followed everyone’s advice, you’d be burning through cash like a BigCo.
I came up with this post because I saw a Hacker News post about backing up data. I remember many times when hard drives crashed and we had to spend $1k to recover data. One of those times we lost some source code. So I thought about writing a post saying you should never skimp on good data backup solutions.
Do what you have to do to stay lean and efficient. Most things are perfectly skimpable.
How would you fill in the blank from your experience?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
Omar
Losing one server likely…losing two or more servers not so likely so i strongly believe in replicating to multiple servers.
If it’s source code, then I recommend just using github (paid version w/private repos) or the more secure bitbucket where you can protect the replication strategy.
For general storage I stand by the mantra: “Disks are cheap”.