August 12, 2004
Moconews.net Gone
All my sympathy to my friend Rafat Ali who's lost two months work on his mobile content blog Moconews.net, due to corrupt database. I know exactly what he's going through as Cyril Fiévet and I experienced the same thing with 6 of our blogs - all of them! (pointblog.com, allrobots.com, textually.org, picturephoning.com, ringtonia.com and textually.org/fr) - except we had NO backup. Our hosting company had a hard disk crash and their backup was corrupt as well. On our end, MT was no longer functioning and the bases were empty. Our blogs were like dead fish.
We were fortunate in that Howard Rheingold recommended a wizard in Canada who came to our rescue, Louis Atkinson from Higher Mind Productions, I'm not sure how he did, it but he created some sort of app that parsed through our sites and managed to save our data in the MT import format.
The moral of the story? backup, backup, backup your blogs. What Rafat and we went through was very very painful.
Another important point is to host your blogs well. Pay more for better service. Cyril and I are now hosted at pair networks and I can only recommend them. Twice a day, the entire hard drive is backed up to a second, shadow drive in the server. From that shadow drive, secondary backups are made every couple of days. From the secondary backups, off-site tape backups are made.
Rafat, hang in there!
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2004/08/004928.htm