So Wednesday morning, April 6th, 2016 at just before 9 am, I saw some chatter among my company's chat that said "hey, the server seems broken". Since there's usually something wonky and we're kind of a casual "****'s on fire yo" sort of operation, that didn't alarm me until about an hour or two later when somebody at the datacenter looked at the server for me and saw a bunch of hard drive errors. I got there that afternoon to confirm and investigate. Uhh, yep, really broken. So, long story short, all the data on that drive is gone, and it contained about 6 sites' data, including this one. Here's the part where I really messed up - I haven't been keeping regular backups of everything. Latest I had was from when the site was moved over from an old server last year, which is March 2015. Some of my sites are just completely gone, I'm thankful I still had this copy of this one...
Data recovery guys tried everything they could but could not recover anything from the drive.
Just going to make one thing clear: this will never happen again. I should have had more respect for all of your time and effort in making this community the great thing that it is. Shame on me to brush off something as important as backing up. A simple set-it-and-forget-it database dump/download every so often would've turned this total disaster--that took us down for 2 weeks and lost all this data--into a minor few-hour inconvenience. I probably could've pulled the trigger on putting up this old copy of the site sooner, but I was holding out hope that they'd recover the data.
Speaking of simple set-it-and-forget-it backups, I will now be setting that up. I'll have at least 6 copies among 3 different places, as well as a cloud backup solution yet to be determined. I repeat, this will never happen again.
Anyone who donated to the recovery fund, expect to see your money back within a few days.
I've beaten myself up probably more than enough, now it's your turn to beat me up.
Data recovery guys tried everything they could but could not recover anything from the drive.
Just going to make one thing clear: this will never happen again. I should have had more respect for all of your time and effort in making this community the great thing that it is. Shame on me to brush off something as important as backing up. A simple set-it-and-forget-it database dump/download every so often would've turned this total disaster--that took us down for 2 weeks and lost all this data--into a minor few-hour inconvenience. I probably could've pulled the trigger on putting up this old copy of the site sooner, but I was holding out hope that they'd recover the data.
Speaking of simple set-it-and-forget-it backups, I will now be setting that up. I'll have at least 6 copies among 3 different places, as well as a cloud backup solution yet to be determined. I repeat, this will never happen again.
Anyone who donated to the recovery fund, expect to see your money back within a few days.
I've beaten myself up probably more than enough, now it's your turn to beat me up.
