Blog vulnerabilities
Last December 29, my website just suddenly became inaccessible, and for the past two days, anybody who tried to access it, ended up in an error page. At first I was dumbfounded. True, my web host sent an advisory about a scheduled downtime due to some server migration, but that was supposed to be today, December 30. Perhaps it was one day early, I thought. However, their advisory said it would take at most 24 hours. By tonight, it had been almost two days. I was honestly getting really impatient and pissed. Not that it should really matter, it’s not as if there’s much to lose financially for me. This blog doesn’t even generate a dollar a day from paid advertising.
Anyway, so when my blog got back up, what I saw was a time warp from a week ago. Everything that had been posted after a week ago, from entries to comments and pictures were gone. Good thing, good-ol’ Google keeps back-ups of the internet and I was able to recover what I had written this week. My web host explained that prior to the scheduled server migration (whatever that meant), there was also a server crash.
So, since this incident reminded me that this blog, and its 6+ years worth of memories, is vulnerable to such technical malfunctions, and also because I had some disposable e-dollars in my PayPal account, I decided to buy myself a pair of paid/premium accounts at Flickr and LiveJournal.
So for now, I’m going on a Multiply hiatus. See me in Flickr instead. And my more personal thoughts shall have a new home in LiveJournal.
that meant their backup was a week old. Better than having no backups though. I know of a blogger who lost his whole site as in ZERO backup all due to the webhost’s fault.
better than getting your password gone in your head, right?
its always best practice to back up. not only important files sa computer but, especially blogs. Since I’m sticking with Wordpress, what i do are the following:
- installed a database backup plugin and set an automatic backup for my blogs and have it emailed to my gmail
- weekly, i copy the files via ftp (just the new ones and these are usually the photos in the posts. If you are with flickr, no need to do this always except if you change some files or add plugins/themes) to my local hard drive which is also copied to a separate drive or burned to dvd together with my other important files at least a month
- as I only go to internet cafes once I’m back in makati, I have a local install of my wordpress blogs in my computer before getting posted eventually to my online blog.