It’s Not “IF”, It’s “WHEN”

I will spare you the long story and just say that yesterday I accidentally DELETED my entire blog and blog database from my web server. Yes there were some tears and some nausea. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve nearly everything except comments on most of the posts from the past 4 months.

CALL FOR COMMENTS – If you commented on any of my posts during the past 4 months (since mid-March), and you have those comments archived in coComments or some other place, I would very much appreciate if you could repost your comment on the appropriate blog post.

I will be adding in retrieved comments (from recently cached Google pages) directly into the body of the posts for now. Getting them back into the data table for comments will be tricky, so I’m not even going to attempt to do that right now. Hopefully this won’t cause problems for anyone.

I do have to re-customize the blog template and I still need to rebuild my sidebars and additional pages, but it all could have been much worse.

I am incredibly grateful for Google for caching some of my content. I used the technique described by Dave Cormier here. I took the content that was cached and copied and pasted each page into a new Google Docs document – this preserved the links and structure of the text. Very nice

I am also very happy that I have used Ecto to write my blog posts – AND that I had the foresight to make sure the program was set to store local copies of posts on my computer after posting to my blog.

If you linked to any of my blog posts then you shouldn’t have to change anything. I carefully restored the recent blog posts to ensure that the URLs for each post were the same as before (another nice feature of Ecto – the syncing between the blog database and the program to ensure accurate post IDs).

I am also glad that I do occasionally do full backups of my entire home directory on my server. This saved me countless hours of work.

And, as Miguel Guhlin said last night:

mguhlin @ssandifer The opportunity to begin anew is often disguised as a disaster.

As I restored all of the posts from March 2008 post-by-post – a tedious process – I spent time reflecting on what and when I post on my blog. This gives me the opportunity to rethink some of the design of this blog and to think carefully about my content.

I’ll be continuing to work on this restoration today (and most of this week), but the bulk of the work is completed.

So here’s my PSA/warning to everyone – Backup your stuff! Backup, backup, backup! The data you save just might be your own.

Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.