Comments on: Rumours of this blog’s death…….

By: Miriam O'Dowd

Miriam O'Dowd — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 22:06:05 +0000

that is an easy place to be lost in :)

By: Dan O'Reilly

Dan O'Reilly — Thu, 25 May 2006 16:46:16 +0000

Welcome back! Always enjoy the creative insights found on Confused of Calcutta.

By: anon

anon — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:01:51 +0000

I admire your ability to move on without blaming your host.

If you’re at all interested, you may be able to google yourself and then click on their cached links. I came looking for an article here that obviously got hosted in the disk crash and is no more, but it’s still out there in the great cache – thank you, and thanks google :)

By: YGG

YGG — Wed, 24 May 2006 12:56:28 +0000

Sorry to hear that — but let’s continue the conversations, right?

By: James Dellow

James Dellow — Wed, 24 May 2006 02:26:12 +0000

Too late now of course, but next time try http://www.httrack.com/ for creating your own periodic backup of your blog.

By: Ed Cone

Ed Cone — Wed, 24 May 2006 01:33:13 +0000

Ouch.

But we’re still here talking, so that tells you something.

By: Martin Geddes

Martin Geddes — Tue, 23 May 2006 19:58:52 +0000

My lessons from running my own blog:

- If you’re doing more than sharing news of the kids and pics of the dog, always register a domain of your own. Never be tied to any one hosting service or blogging platform. You’ll regret it. Make it your own personal microbrand, don’t confuse it with that of the postman who stored and delivered the bits. (Obviously, someone from Calcutta isn’t as confused here as he purports ;) )
- Only host your data somewhere that can provide a dump or export. My host (pair.net) lets me run a nightly cron job to dump the MySQL database to flat files.
- Sync that export daily, and keep weekly and monthly backups in case of gun-foot-shoot accidents. I personally use my always-on home server to rsync the data down, but you can do the same to your laptop with a scheduled job just as easily. It’s one line of script and a Windows scheduled task.

And whatever you do, don’t ask me about my embarassing data deletion and loss screw-ups. I’m not telling, particularly about the 30,000 lost bank transaction records.

PS – My blog backup has already save my ass once in 3 years.

By: Chris Locke

Chris Locke — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:06:52 +0000

C’mon, we all know you did this as an “object lesson” of some sort! Like to make us all think about what would happen if Google crashed. Or the entire net…

By: JasTur

JasTur — Tue, 23 May 2006 17:39:23 +0000

Faced with a similarly painful situation – and as a last resort – I took a failed disk, that had not been sufficiently frequently backed up, to a specialist. He tried everything – and then his last resort … an approach resulting from unrestrained, shared, experience and freedom to experiment. It had worked before. He gave the hard drive a whack at a practised angle. In bringing its side down on to the palm of his hand, he managed to get the disk working – temporarily.

This approach is clearly not without risk of further damage, nor is it necessarily the right approach but sometimes the unorthodox, unconventional route is the optimum (or even only) way to solve a problem – until the route becomes entirely discredited, mainstream or superceded with something better – a sort of early adopter’s advantage/disadvantage .

Once all the other options have been attempted, your hosts may decide to investigate, or reject, this (literally) lateral solution – or another unorthodox approach such as freezing the drive. Some of these are listed in the pdf: ’200 ways to revive a hard drive’ http://www.governmentsecurity.org/forum/index.php?act=Attach&type=post&id=4036

By: Jackie Danicki

Jackie Danicki — Tue, 23 May 2006 16:36:34 +0000

If it helps (and I’m sure it won’t…much), I have seven of your past posts marked as new in my aggregator. But that’s not even a dent in what was here. Your calm is humbling, because I would be going apeshit.