When my blog disappeared, I wasn’t too worried; figured it was just a minor fuckup on the server. When it wasn’t back the next day, I was somewhat concerned, and I called. Turns out that one of the servers upon which lived their MySQL databases (including mine) had a catastrophic hardware failure, and the hard drive died. When the tech (using the term in its most generous sense) told me that, I immediately thought, “Oh, so they’ll restore from a backup and I’ll lose the last couple of posts…no big deal,” but my optimism was unfounded. If they had any recent backups, they didn’t tell me that; she said they were sending the HDD to a data recovery company, and they wouldn’t know anything for a few days. I heard nothing, and although I kept checking, I’d just get a message that I had not installed WordPress. Not that I’d die without my blog (though I do have a large audience, and “hi” to both of my fans!) but that’s not the point…they killed it. My most recent backup was made on 17 December, thanks in large part to my ESLs, with whom I’ve spent so much time that I haven’t been making backups as I usually would, and I didn’t want to restore from that if they’d be able to save more recent data. On Thursday, I got this email:

We have recently encountered issues with the mySQL server that your databases are utilizing. On Sunday, February 17, 2008, our System Administration team took the mySQL server offline for scheduled maintenance and while they were performing this maintenance, they found that one of the hard drives was failing. Our team worked as quickly as they could to preserve as much data as possible.

Our System Administrators were able to save, and restore, approximately 80% of the data. We realize that 80% is not acceptable, therefore, we have sent the failed drive to a data recovery specialist. They have stated that they should be able to recover 95 – 100% of the data by Friday, February 29, 2008. It will take this long due to the damage to the drive and the amount of data on it. At that time, our System Administration team will do a complete backup of the current data on your mySQL server and then begin restoring the data we received from the data recovery specialist. We are going to make a current complete backup in case you have uploaded content since the hard drive failure. We will be prepared to do a restore, if needed, of this content.

We are very sorry about the inconvenience that you have suffered due to this incidence. We are providing compensation to our customers that have been adversely affected by this occurrence. Please place a ticket to our billing department and they will review your request as quickly as possible.

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.

I checked this evening….lo, and behold, they were able to recover all of my stuff. All of my Euro-fans (hee hee) are in bed, so now would be a good time to make a DB backup…if I was sober. 😉