I noticed that I couldn’t retrieve my e-mail this past Wednesday. I blew it off because my current hosting provider has been dodgy since I signed on with them almost 2 years ago. I’ll have 3 months of flawless service where I can always retrieve my e-mails and my weblog is available to all (for heckling). Then there’ll be periods where every other day, I’ll get sporadic e-mail service and loads at a pace on par with celestial events (i.e. like Halley’s comet, you’ll see it again if you live long enough).
After 2 days, I got tired of not being able to get my e-mail and went to the hosting website to open a problem ticket. This was when I found out that a few of their servers had been compromised. Apparently, the virtual vandals went around erasing things at will. One of them happened to be my weblog database. Crap. Well. I’d had enough of this web hosting company after this incident and decided last night to switch to a new hosting company that was a bit more reputable. One that didn’t keep the doors unlocked and the goods visible to all. Of course I was paying pretty low prices for what I was getting, so maybe I shouldn’t have expected first class service for third class fares.
Once I found out about what was lost, a hint of fear and resignation began to set in. I am NOT going to reproduce 2 years worth of posts by hand all over again. I frantically went back and searched through all the back-ups I’d made. Okay. So I’m not as manly as I purport to be in my title. But I’m manly enough. Anymore and the women might just tear me limb-from-limb. Luckily being in the technology field, having experienced lost of data before, and just being paranoid about loss of something signficant has kept me from losing all of my data. On the flip side, it wasn’t enough because I got complacent recently and never got around to backing up in the last 5 months. Shit! But . . . I got back more than I thought I was ever going to be able to get. So I’m thankful for my good fortunes.
Anyway, as it goes, I’ve lost the entire year’s post that I am going to have to reproduce. I think I’ll label them my virtual “Fugue Period” and fill it with a bunch of nonsense. Or not.