It’s happened a couple of times, you know. I’ve lost everything on the server, had to move on and set up again. Life as a geek is so hard, eh?

Each time I learn a bit about what I should have been doing, but forget to implement it and repeat the cycle.

So what did I learn this time round?

Backups are priceless

The amount of time I’ve spent setting up apache, mysql, pisg, and the numerous other things that I run has been unreal. My skills may be a bit out of practice, but I don’t intend to be a sysadmin, so I don’t need to keep them in check.

It’s the data, though, that’s the killer. Blogs, themes, year-old chat logs, webpages, projects, ideas and thoughts.

So I’m not making that mistake again… bash, scp and tar are my friends for this job.

I need to get a script thrown together to do that.

As for blogs, I’m making them external, hence the increase in activity here. I like tumblr. It’s pretty, low maintenance, low rent and backed up for me. I don’t need to worry. That much. Maybe I’ll wget it from time to time. Hopefully I won’t lose most of it again.

For those of you who’ve cared to notice, that’s why paddleporn.com is down too… I’ll decide what I’m doing with that in due course.

Until then - backup, don’t lose data and be nice to your computer.

hxx