The Mortal Wombat

A fortnight ago I was dismayed to find that my website was broken. The site was accessible, but it was displaying MySQL error messages. When I went to Hostroute support (Hostroute is the company that provides my webspace) I discovered this entry in their staff blog. Due to quite unbelievable levels of ineptness their contractors had done a system rebuild on the server without checking that they'd backed up the database stuff first. The result was that I (and many others) lost our databases. This was particularly bad for me, because I'd stupidly not made a backup of my family tree data since May. I know, I know, I'm an idiot.

I've managed to get some compensation out of Hostroute: £2.75 for the time that the server was actually down, and a month's free hosting (worth £5.50) for the loss of my data. £8.25 won't quite cover the many hours of my free time that it'll take to get back to the point I'd reached in my research, but then they aren't strictly liable for loss of data, and I was stupid for not keeping a local copy.

So rather than getting stuck into re-inputting the lost data, I've spent a while setting up an automated backup routine (daily cron mysqldump on the server, and weekly anacron download script on my home computer).

If reading this has made you nervous about backing up your data, I'd recommend Adrian's DataCocoon.

So now I'm ready to start redoing all my research since May... Sob.