This is my first post to the blog in while because of the outage I experienced during most of November and December. There was a perfect storm of events in August / September / October that sucked up all of my free time and kept me away from the blog. The nail in the coffin that led to the lapse in posts was when all of data on the domain got corrupted in November, including all of the backups that were sitting on the server. After much digging and work over the holiday break, I have successfully raised the blog from the grave, and it is bigger and better on a new host. I have migrated to laughing squid, and after a week, things are still humming along nicely. I also took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and take advantage of all of the latest goodness (keep a look out for a blog post from my iPhone!).
Because of my recent trials and tribulations with this little blog, a recent news item on Hacker News really struck a chord with me. JournalSpace was the newest member of the deadpool on Monday after all of its data mysteriously disappeared from their servers. Allegedly, a disgruntled employee wiped the server clean, but there are some gaps in the story from the company. Yes, management should have guaranteed that there were backups being completed and taken offsite, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for a group of people that have poured all of their energy into their startup, only to have it disappear overnight.
My lesson learned from my own experience (and this story) is to make sure that I am as rigorous with backups to my blog as I am with the rest of my data. My desktop at home has hardware level RAID 5 and syncs with my old desktop (8 years old and still running XP). For extra peace of mind, I also have all of my key data backed up to S3 with Jungle Disk. I haven’t refined my automated backup for the blog, but rest assured I am going to make sure that this does not happen again!