Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…

My computer has lost its mind: at least the one running my website 🙁

While on vacation I started to receive email from my VPS provider: saying that some of their systems were compromised and that many customers were being reverted to their plain-vanilla virtual machines, or restored from backups. I was one of the people who got everything wiped, and had to fall back on my own backups.

No big deal, right?

I had automated backups configured for this website and my Minecraft Server…. however they weren’t working properly, and in the case of the Minecraft backups I had gotten lazy:

  • The website database backups automatically get sent to me by email (they’re small), but that feature was part of a plugin that got disabled during a WordPress upgrade back in March 2012 – and I didn’t notice
  • Because I had lots of disk space on my server, and because Minecraft backups are large: I had been keeping a rotating collection of backups… but on the server. That was protecting me from doing something stupid (i.e. failed Minecraft update).. but wasn’t protecting me from a complete server meltdown
  • Long story short: except for a few exceptions I had to roll everything back to how it was in March, then cobble back together any blog updates from then until now. We lost about 6 months of Minecraft updates: lots of world changes we’ll have to redo, and blog updates (if any) between Dec 2011 and March 2012 are gone too. I just spent 4 hours stitching things back together, and this is as good as it’s going to get.

    Current task: make sure everything “in the Cloud” gets copied to my home PC every day 🙂

    Leave a Reply