Several days ago, it was brought to my attention that two notable blogs, blog.stackoverflow.com and www.codinghorror.com were completely lost due to a hard drive failure. Jeff Atwood, the owner of both blogs, tells all about his experience trying to recover the text and images from Internet caches and other locations. (I imagine Jeff's reaction was a little like the picture above when he discovered his blogs were gone.) Lucky for him, a computer science student at the University of Bologna had an almost complete mirror of the Coding Horror website.Jeff also acknowledges that he's to blame for the loss, and I'm sure Jeff will be re-doubling efforts to backup his sites in the future. However, these types of losses will continue for the foreseeable future... backing up your stuff is often the lowest priority for all of us because many of us believe it won't happen to us. Or we consciously know it will happen to us, but we have so many other things we need to get done today that setting up a backup routine is put off until tomorrow. I'm in the same camp... I didn't create a backup of my class work until over a month into the semester!
Even when you backup your stuff, you sometimes find that your backups weren't working or are inaccessible when you need them. That's what happened to Jeff.
Jeff tried to use Warrick initially, but it was giving him all kinds of problems. Yahoo and Microsoft have done some things that make Warrick break, and I'll be spending next week making fixes. I'll blog more about the fixes next week. For now, it's back to grading final exams.
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