*rant alert*
Okay, I fear I’ll have to face the truth: HostForWeb (the web hoster for this site) truly succeeded to mess thing up totally. First I couldn’t believe it: which web provider creates daily backups and fails to notice when something goes wrong? This server has been trouble from in the beginning. Complaints about the slugginess were heard, but not solved. They were talking about too much IO on our VPS. D’uh, if you have disks crashing, the RAID configuration becomes more stressed. 😉 So finally, some disks probably stopped working totally, giving some signal to support. That’s too late of course. Still, after some time, they were solving the problem and everything seemed alright, no data lost. Except, there was a permission error on a temp dir which stopped the mysql server from working. So they decided to restore a backup. Alright for me, except… they forgot they didn’t make backups the last weeks… So data got lost!
I’m telling this all in one post, but I can reassure you reality was less smooth. It took days & weeks until they would admit this! Either HFW is totally understaffed, either there are too little experienced support people. In general I would not complain that much about HFW support, but this incident was simply over the edge.
Data loss could have been easily prevented. In my case, I only lost some mail and posts, but suppose you use your site for more serious ($ping$ping$) stuff? Still, I’m quite pissed off since I just wrote 2 rather long posts about my cell phone and about SED monitors. Oh well 🙂
Anyhow, I tried to recover as much as could from any cache I could find on the internet. Google seems to cache quite fine, except the latest posts who were only a few days on the net. So I tried several blog searches which all had some pieces; some more than the other, if you digged deep enough.
The funny thing is, I just upgraded my wordpress the night before the data loss. So I _had_ a backup of the database, I _had_ a backup of my wordpress. If only they didn’t nicely overwrite my home dir with an older version :roll eyes:. So for me, it was a quite frustrating experience. 😉
Sorry for ranting so much, but as you can see, I still can’t accept the facts.. ;-p
What I will do now, is repost all old posts with what I recovered from the internet caches. Where information is lost, I’ll link to this posts to clarify. I’m currently not in the mood to rewrite everything (I even can’t remember all the freaky details I like to whine about ;)). I will keep the original dates, so it may become a little confusing. =)
