July 24th, 2011 by Glendyn

Last Thursday night Hoaxville disappeared. Some angry nerd and his bots hacked in and deleted the entire site and left a lovely (read shitty) message proudly stating they had done so. I contacted the host company in the U.S and they confirmed the site was indeed just ‘not there anymore’. They asked if I had a back-up of the site and the terrible sinking feeling began to well and truly, sink in.

I know in the scheme of things losing a blog is not that huge, but I felt gutted (not unlike the pigs above which I snapped in Beaconsfield recently). I quickly began the process of trying to see it from all angles, trying to console myself with ‘it’s just a blog’, ‘you can start again…’, ‘surely there is a positive in this somewhere’ etc… but it began to hit very hard the importance of not only this blog is to me, but the whole concept of  irreplaceable ‘data’ is. Especially when it’s personal, and has been amassed over time. I have been lucky enough (unlucky enough?) to have had my home broken into just once in my life (touch wood!). The thieves didnt get away with much, but one of the things they did take was my back-pack that had a camera, my laptop and most importantly the notebook I had been using for over a year. I didn’t care about the laptop or the camera, they were insured and backed-up, but I still feel bad sometimes about that simple back moleskin notebook. It was useless to the the thieves but had the most value to me.

So it was a really similar feeling to being robbed, even if what was stolen is just my random ramblings and to cut a long and boring story short, after being told by a few people that the site was ‘gone’. I received an email from the host on Friday evening saying they did actually have a back up of the site from the previous week and within an hour or so Hoaxville was back on the internet map. A huge sigh of relief. That night I installed a back-up utility and changed and reinforced my passwords.

I’m actually pretty good with backing up (I have back ups of my back ups!) but I foolishly thought that because a blog is already in ‘the cloud’ the need to back-up was less important. But there are some lessons we learn the hard way. So… if you have a blog, back it up. Now!

A shout out it to my buddy Stu for his help and also to Kobi at Data Rescue, who if you ever lose anything digital, is the man to talk to!