Yeah, I am sure you heard all the horrific stories with sites lost and the likes and thought: well, that would never happen to me.
Guess what: this is exactly what I was thinking until Friday, 2 weeks ago (the date: July 20th). Then, out of nowhere, my server shut down. I installed a rescue system and fsck the older one. I recovered some info… almost 60% of it. Think about it, 40GB of sites and no backup for the last month (one of the most productive of the entire year).
Guess more: it was during my vacation (I was at the seaside, getting a nice tan) and during a period in which the temperature in Bucharest was around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Just what you would want, isn’t it? Working around at your server with 40GB of data to move at a 800kB/s on such a temperature…
The final story? It took me 2 weeks (I’ve changed my apartment during the same period of time) to have all the sites back up. Why I guilty for the server breakdown? Not at all. Was I guilty for the lack of backups? You betcha.
I did, actually, recovered a lot more later, using some Google cache, some fiddling around through the server files (I recovered the databases from the /var/lib/mysql ) directory aso. More, in some posts along the way this month, on what you should do when this happens and what to look for when you are putting the server back together.
How much did I lose? Probably one month’s rent, at least, (and trust me, it’s not cheap). More importantly, though, I have lost a lot of time when I could, if anything else, have some fun and undiscriminating… actions… on the seaside… well, bummer, backups, here I come!
