I'm Back (Sort Of)

In case you hadn’t noticed, all the websites that I operate (cubanlinks.org, dckickball.org, etc) have been down. This is due to the complete and utter failure of the hard drive of the machine that powered those sites. The machine in question (Taurus) was an old Dell PC that was donated to me by my roommate. Despite having all my eggs in a single basket, I failed to take the mandatory precautions (backup, failover, etc) that any competent system administrator would have taken, and as a result I have lost everything.

I am now in the process of resurrecting these sites within the confines of a professional hosting company, TextDrive. The days of me running my own server for anything mission-critical are behind me. Not only did I lose my own code and data, I screwed over my buddies Matt and Eddie who had been running their sites on my machine.

One bright spot has been the recovery of my content via a tool called Warrick that uses various caching services and APIs from Google, Yahoo, the Internet Archive and others to reconstruct lost websites. So far, I’ve recovered posts for Cubanlinks going all the way back to its first post in 2002. It also looks like I’ve recovered good amount of the content from DCKickball. Now I just need to figure out the easiest way to import these HTML files back in to their respective databases.

That’s enough for now. I’ll describe the rebuilding process in more detail as I go along. The main point that I want to get across is this: BACK UP YOUR DATA!. The shock of losing a year’s worth of blood and sweat (regarding the code that powered DCKickball) still has yet to fully sink in. Don’t pull a Carter.