# Does age affect the reliability of a server?



## FlyingScotsman (Jun 21, 2011)

Hey everyone,

I am trying to learn as much as I can about networking, servers, and other aspects of that side of IT right now, and I have a question regarding server age. I was just told by someone that the age of a server doesn't matter, and that it is only the quality of components that count. As I understand it, common sense would dictate that the older something is the sooner it will fail, regardless of quality; better quality would mean that it will just take longer to fail. Also, wouldn't a server that has been under continuous load for years be more prone to reliability problems? I would really like to know if I am completely off base here, I am still rather new to this side of things and would like to know more. Thanks for your help!


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## wmorri (May 29, 2008)

Hi,

So a server that is under load for a long time will always have issues down the road in terms of reliability but I am talking years and years down the road. I have a server built of old desktop parts that has been running linux for three or four years and it has been running almost continuously and hasn't faltered yet so it is all a matter of what the server is doing. 

The best thing to do with servers is to have backups. I would recommend doing a full backup of a server every month or two depending on how mission critical it is, and partial backups every week so you will always be able to get back up and running in a timely manner should something fail.


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## FlyingScotsman (Jun 21, 2011)

Awesome, that answers my question perfectly. Thanks!


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## resourcesys (Aug 10, 2012)

wmorri said:


> Hi,
> 
> So a server that is under load for a long time will always have issues down the road in terms of reliability but I am talking years and years down the road. I have a server built of old desktop parts that has been running linux for three or four years and it has been running almost continuously and hasn't faltered yet so it is all a matter of what the server is doing.
> 
> The best thing to do with servers is to have backups. I would recommend doing a full backup of a server every month or two depending on how mission critical it is, and partial backups every week so you will always be able to get back up and running in a timely manner should something fail.


Hello FlyingScotsman,

This has been a perfect way on how a server behaves as years past by explained by Wmorri. To elaborate it lets take an example,

Suppose you have an site for which you have number of users uploading/downloading through sites (like, shopping carts) where databases are being updated on a daily basis but the site's files are not.
Here, as backups you should take daily backups of your databases (as its updates regularly) and take backup of your site files weekly.

At the end of the month you can start taking the whole server configuration backups along with the above backups. In this way you could have your data backup that can save you in case anything unfortunate happens with the server.

Regards


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