John Topley’s Weblog

In Get Your Back Up I talked about how I safeguard my data and proudly proclaimed that in seven years of home PC computing I've not lost a single byte of data. And that's still true. On the desktop. Unfortunately I have just lost some data on a server—for the article comments that were on this website are irretrievably lost. My hosting provider has confirmed this. It was only thirty rows spread across two database tables but I'm kicking myself over my complacency.

I'd briefly read in my hosting provider's terms and conditions that they do not back up client data held on their servers, but for some reason the logical follow–up thought didn't form in my mind: “I need to do something about this.” I think I thought it was one of those things that I'd get around to once more pressing matters had been dealt with.

Truth be told, I didn't lose very much data at all. However, it was data that was important to me because they were the very first comments that people had made in response to my fledgling blog. It almost has sentimental value to me.

Anyway, that's enough meta-blogging (blogging about blogging) articles for the time being. This site is firing on all cylinders once more and I've taken steps to ensure that the same thing can't happen again. I now need to connect to a computer that I will never see, in a location unknown to me, to back up some information that has great value to me.