In essence, my hosts experienced a series of hardware problems, so all my sites disappeared and my email addresses stopped working.

On Thursday, 9th November, the hosting came back, sans content. Ian & I contacted our hosts who restored as much as they could.

On Friday, 10th November, I had the exciting task of restoring the vast majority of my content from scratch: My database (for entries, comments etc), my files (for themes etc) and all my settings (for email etc). This took quite some time. Luckily, as I backup often it wasn’t too much of a headache. It was stressful though, because I don’t backup enough and I’d never tested my backups.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll be making my disaster recovery strategy more apparent. In the meantime, I won’t be ranting and raving about my hosts because I haven’t got the full story yet (when I’ve got it; I’ll share it). Instead, I’ll be doing something altogether more karmic, sharing what I’ve learnt:

How to take the sting out of hardware failure: My advice and the lessons I’ve learnt

Backup! Backup! Backup!

Backing up: Some quotations & links to get you started

Deciding what to back up is highly personal. Anything you cannot replace easily should be at the top of your list. Before you get started, make a checklist of files to back up. This will help you determine what to back up, and also give you a reference list in the event you need to retrieve a backed-up file.

Microsoft: How to decide what data to back up

Backup refers to the copying of data so that these additional copies may be restored after a data loss event… to restore a computer to an operational state following a disaster (called disaster recovery) [or] to restore small numbers of files after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted.

Wikipedia: Backup

“Why Smart People Do Dumb Things” (Like Not Backup Their Hard Disk), by Guy Kawaski. Read this, it’s so excellent: It’s all gold dust; I couldn’t possibly quote it.

Backing up, WordPress-specific guides, including tutorials, plugins etc.

• WordPress Database Backup Plugin, by Skippy
  Quick, easy backups of your database
• WP-Cron Plugin, by Skippy
  Use in conjunction with the above plugin for automatic backups of your database
• WordPress Backup Recommendations, by Kathleen

Seven rules for backing up your data

1. Coverage: Backup ALL your data
2. Frequency: Backup frequently
3. Separation: Take some backups offsite
4. History: Keep some old backups
5. Testing: Test your backups
6. Security: Secure your backups
7. Integrity: Perform integrity checking

See also, The Tao of Backup Excellent, humorous, witty. Highly recommended!