Mini-rant:
Hardware sucks! As you may know, I had a drive die on November 12th. What you probably don’t know is that my server’s drive kicked the bit bucket a couple of weeks later. It had been my backup drive, but (stupidly) I hadn’t backed up the backup…
Among the things I lost was the database containing my first weblog, J-Space.
I sulked for a week or so, telling myself that it was OK. It was all in the past, and who would be searching for it anyway, so why bother… Then I got an email from an aquaintance who knew me in a past life – my life as a rock-star. He wanted to know what had happened to my site, and why he couldn’t get to it anymore. Whoops!
I sent a conciliatory reply, saying that the site was gone, and that there wasn’t much I could do about it. I thought it was over… I was starting over, that is.
Then a couple of days later, while doing a search for some totally unrelated information using Google, I had an epiphany – maybe my whole site is still cached on Google’s servers! Sure enough, doing an advanced search for the word Jacob on the domain jspace.org, I found all of my copy! Google saved my ass!
I downloaded all of the content to my new drive as insurance against Google’s cache expiring. It’s all there – except the pictures, which I’ll have to re-scan to replace the missing ones… But the text – the stuff that’s most difficult to recreate – is saved!
Thank you, Google!
Ok, now all I have to do is to re-assimilate the content so I can put the site up again. (This may take a little time, and I have so little these days!)
My story of the recovery of J-Space is the opposite of a story I hear all too often: “But all of my data was on your server – what do you mean there’s no way to get it back?!?!?!?”
(P.S. I backed up the backup this time!)
(P.P.S. Apparently I’m not the only one to have done this.)
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