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Yesterday something funny happened to my website. It suddenly reverted to how it looked a week ago, Oct 16th, changes since then were lost. When I went to my host website they said they were "resolving to a new server". Luckily I had my own backup from Oct 22nd so I restored that.
I *hope* that this is some unscheduled/emergency thing going on - otherwise they should have given me some notice and I would have taken an even more recent backup, and also warned my bulletin board users and subdomain/add-on domain clients.
Now that I've restored my own backup, I have only lost about 24 hours worth of changes - which means one blog entry and probably 10-15 bulletin board posts. The worst thing is that an add-on domain I am hosting for someone else is no longer working. Hopefully my host will be able to figure out that problem soon.
Anyway - my lost blog entry was about how we are having trouble with home appliances breaking down. Our dishwasher has been acting up for months (leaving crud on the dishes) and finally had a big blow-out on Saturday leaking water all over the kitchen floor. So Wednesday night we went out and bought a new one (it should be installed today). Then Thursday morning we woke up to find that our hot water tank had leaked all over the garage! We had to get that replaced right away yesterday so we could shower and stuff. This really sucks, especially after we have just spent so much other money on the house. This stuff, especially the hot water tank, is not money we were planning on spending. I think we need to settle down and stop spending so much money for a while... and watch the bills start to roll in... Luckily Home Depot has that "No Interest No Payment for 6 months" thing going on!
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Just wanted to update on this, the host apparently didn't publicize their expected downtime because they were taking care of a "security hole" that they didn't want to announce. Hmmmm.
Anyway, because they moved to new servers, it turns out I could have used the old IP address to find my old site and take an up-to-date backup. However, I didn't know that until it was too late. Because, my bulletin board keeps on ticking on and by the time I restored my own backup (probably about 2 hours after the downtime) there were already 20 or so new posts that I had to manually edit to make them show up on the restored board. If I had restored another backup even later (like a day or so, when I found out it was available) it would have caused a big mess on the BBS. Sure I could have gotten back those 10 or so posts and 1 blog entry I lost, but I would have lost all the even more recent posts... probably 30 or more by that time. So, not worth it.
I still think this was a bit of a communication mess-up. But anyway, no serious harm done. And my host has offered to give all existing customers a free daily backup service (it is offered as an upgrade / added service package to new customers) so I think they are trying to make it all up. For myself, I think I will keep taking my backups as often as I can remember to - I just like knowing they are safe here with me.