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Server Crash of 2011

Well my server crashed last week. Seems that Virpus got hacked and lost all their nodes :( Now shit happens so you can't hold that against them. However not to have a disaster recovery plan is a bit mad but then again for $5 a month I am not complaining, as I've said before :)

I used my own backups from Dropbox. Everything important was there apart from the databases. I don't know what happened but for some reason they just weren't there :( A real pain in the ass that is I can tell you! I got /most/ of my blog articles from my Google Reader account, exported them out and then with some jiggery pokery in PERL and bunged it into the database. I am missing a few entries which is annoying, if anyone can help out with that I would be thankful.

As well as losing a few entries I also lost the tag cloud information and the dates of any articles written before the 10th of December 2010. Again a pain in the ass but nothing massive. It wont take long for it to come back again with the new entries. I re-installed shorty for links, obviously old ones wont work but sure.

I will have to put up a 404 page to explain why a certain entry isn't available if anything references it and point them back to the search page. Other than that its all done.

My main complaint is that I will have to re-install XMLTV - it was a pain, I'll probably do that on Thursday night during Question Time. The sneaky script I had to get the star pictures is now useless. Grrrrrrr...

Luckily because I use Google for Domains for my email it wasn't that big a deal to lose everything. Just a tad annoying. I hope Virpus recover from this but it wont be known until Feb 2012 in my opinion. Those businesses and people that had their servers with them and paid for a years subscription wont move straight away. That is the main problem with outages - the damage they cause cannot be measured for at least a year :/ I am keeping my options open and it better not happen again.

It will take a few months before I get everything installed that I had before, things like that just take time. Ahh well.. I am back and that's all that matters :)

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