Learn 2 Backup

This is totally an off-topic note; it’s a service announcement for the 5 people who cares about the persistence of content on this site. Too bad I’m one of them. I apologize.

As you may notice, my old hosting died and as a result I lost some data. I’m still not 100% sure how much data I lost. The funny thing is I used to run a daily cron job that cloned the blog database schema, downloaded to my home server. Somehow after some time in 2008, that cron job ceased to run correctly and I wasn’t smart enough to set up some kind of trap for that particular error. Since I only kept a week of backup I basically lost all that, up to a hard saved point in ’08. It’s actually more complicated than that, because I did catch the problem at some point in 2009 and I didn’t come up with a fix immediately, and after a hardware migration at home I kind of just forgot to set it up again.

The rest of the site is probably not as important, but I have a saved point at around the time I switched to a major WordPress code base upgrade in May. But that stuff is not as important.

The life lesson here, guys: learn to back up your crap, and do it. It’s most likely worth every minute of your time because at the end you will thank yourself for having enough foresight or have developed this good practice that will ultimately save you a lot of time and headache. More than what you put into for learning the stuff in the first place.

The positive note here is that Google, being the evil archival monster that it is, has at least the text every post I’ve written since the hard save point. I can actually copy it all over, manually or otherwise. It’s just a much more painful process than importing a mySQL DB. The comments are another story; I think I have a good amount of them available but it would be probably too troublesome to do it. Plus, it’s weird to manually restore comments since I wouldn’t have the email information.

In the meanwhile, business will carry on as usual on this site off WordPress.com. My hats off to this pretty neat free blogging service for being a shelter during a rough time. I’ll slowly rebuild the site on a different location and then finally migrate the content here across to where it belongs, when everything is done. Hopefully I can make it seamless, but one thing that bothers me is the permalinks may change if I do all this manually, if I cannot be bothered to keep it the same. It’s one of my top priorities during the rebuild but I can’t guarantee it.

Sometimes I feel like blogging is like Black Rock Shooter. In reality you’re just a kid, but you are actually fighting a battle that alters real relationships when you’re blogging. Even if it’s just junk you’ve made up to sell figures. But it feels like such effort!