Smile at a stranger by Nina Matthews Photography
Attribution License

A couple of folk might have noticed that this blog and site was down for the last couple of days. The first day or two was a problem with the host who fixed things last night. At about the same time as johnjohnston.info came back up I was checking to see if ftp was still working, unfortunately as it turned out, it was.

Somehow while using Cyberduck to browse the site I managed to drag the public_html folder inside another folder. I was intending to download as a backup, I turned round to speak to my wife and when I looked back I could not see the folder. I presumed I must have deleted it, even though Cyberduck asks for confirmation to delete. At that point the site came back up and of course everything was 404. I quickly contacted by host again and asked him to restore from backup. When I woke this morning the backup seemed to have taken place, but the site was missing except for 2 folders.

Again I contacted my host. Having a last look round the site for some reason I opened up the ruby folder, there was my public_html folder safe & sound. I’ve moved it back and all seems fine.

I have done daft things on web servers before this, but this is the silliest I think. Hopefully a lesson learnt.

It also makes me consider my rather haphazard backup strategy. Recently I’ve been editing html etc directly on the server which means no local backups. I download by blogs database occasionally but often images are uploaded while blogging and deleted from my desktop, I guess I should start using flickr all of the time for image storage.

It has also made me realise how much I value this site, mostly for the time spent on various web experiment which never see the light of day but I would not like to lose. I have a fairly robust desktop backup system, Time Machine and SuperDuper! the later has saved me a couple of times. I need something equally robust and idiot-proof for this website.