Major Suckitude

In case you’re wondering why my blog still doesn’t have the old articles restored, it’s because of a series of Murphy’s Law events that started Friday Morning. My site was down because it was crashing the server for some reason so they shut it off. They turned it back on and I discovered something on the blog page was causing the problem but I couldn’t determine what it was. No one had posted malicious code in a comment. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

So they told me I should move to a better server and plan they had set up. I was running off to San Diego for the weekend, so I saved everything, including the database and determined to deal with it from down there.

I got an email from their tech support telling me how I can move my site, so I followed their instructions only to discover that the move did not automatically move my files. So, fine, I was going to restore it from the database save, except I learned it was corrupted. Not only that but I had to change the DNS, which meant the site would be down for a day regardless of what I did.

On Monday they said they would restore my database. I had set one up in the meantime so my temporary blog would have something to run from. Except they couldn’t find it. It seems it was no longer on the old system because they deleted it. Not only that, but they did not have saves going back to before they deleted it. They only had nightly backups and when I moved the site, their system automatically cleared the space on the old server on Sunday.

Got that? Almost four years of blogging articles down the drain.

Yes, I had backed up my database before, except I never had to restore the files and I discovered the large size of my database made each save unusable because it crashed the save in the middle, before any articles or comments were saved.

My only option is to find some articles on Google cache and copy them into this blog one by one. They have all kinds of formatting problems, but at least that’s an option. I did it for two articles today and I will probably do it for awhile, to get back some of the better stuff I wrote.

But for now, this blog is back to square one. I just have to move forward and not look back, but needless to say, I am not enjoying this.

If you want to help my mood, drop some change in the tip jar to the right. It would be most appreciated.

My condolences on your loss.  That said, another possible source for restoration of some pages is the Internet Wayback Machine.

The cached versions of your site don’t seem to be very up to date, but you might check this site out:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://jameshudnall.com

Posted by  on  12/20  at  11:10 AM

Good point. I thought about that, but wasn’t sure if it included my blog posts. I find that site spotty at times.

But what do you know, it seems to have my blog up to March of this year. I will cherry pick stuff from there and bring some back here.

Posted by James Hudnall  on  12/20  at  01:52 PM

What a nightmare.  All those backups...and none work.  And they only keep backups for one day?  Color me unimpressed.
My computer had the registry go massively corrupt a few months ago.  I smugly brought out my USB drive with an image disk on it, backed up just the night before, and fired up the “BounceBack” program to wipe my corrupt drive and write the image to it.
First failure: the restore CD uses Linux to run the restore process when you boot up, and the driver they use wouldn’t run my keyboard, so I couldn’t type in the YES command to have it restore my drive. Great, just great.
Second failure: I couldn’t remove the HD from the USB drive and swap it for the boot drive in my computer, because it was an IDE drive and my computer uses SATA.
Result: reloading XP and every program amidst a torrent of vile words. At least I could pull my data off the backup drive.
I had a frank discussion with the folks at CMS that charged me $300 for a “failsafe backup” that failed, and got the usual: “Oh, yeah, we’re working on that problem.” Yeah, and I’m working on reversing my credit card charge, too, asswipes.

Posted by  on  12/20  at  10:44 PM
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