Some of you may have noticed, at some point yesterday LISNews bit the dust. I\’m not sure what happened, but being on a large shared server is always an adventure, and this is just one reason why.
Apparently MySQL (the SQL Db this site runs on) crashed, and had to be brought back up from back ups, which meant we lost some data. Now, I ain’t no dummy, so I do back the site up several times a day, but since the SQL server crashed, the backups got written over, and I had to bring it back up from a file that was about 12 hours old, which meant we lost about a dozen or so stories.
This didn’t seem like a big deal, so, I restored everything, and sat down to watch “The Great Outdoors” (I’m on vacation, after all). Now most John Candy movies aren’t exactly intellectually stimulating, so I got to thinking… there must be a copy of those lost stories out there somewhere.
That’s when I noticed a little voice whispering in the back of my head… gooooogle…. It whispered.
Just then it occurred to me I had once read a story of someone who had to rebuild years worth of material from their site from The Mighty Google Cache. Quickly, I put 2 and 2 together (Though I originally came up with 5, I corrected my mistake, and came up with 4), and rushed to Google, and low and behold, Google had actually crawled LISNews between the time it crashed, and the time I had backups from.
What Luck!
So, I was able to rescue Most of the lost stories. I know I missed 3, “Iraq hails Saddam\’s Second Novel”, “Harry Potter, Hidden Dragon”, and “Fed Court Asked To Revoke Remaining Net Obscenity Provision”. Anyone have time to hunt those down?
The comments anyone may have left are lost forever, as far as I can tell, but I’ve become even more attentive to my back up schedule, with little harm done, and a good lesson learned.
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