[Spudooli]

Hey, you think it'll never happen to you. It might not. But it definately happened to me!

The hard drive crashed and burned on my web server on Saturday. Completely dead. My next thought was for my really "informal backups". I've been pretty slack with the whole backup thing. Thinking I was safe with near new drives and that my website wasn't really important.

But when it was gone, oh man, was it suddenly important? Yes, I wanted it back so bad.

Luckily I had enough backups laying around that I rebuilt the server and the site in only 12 hours of hard work. In the end I didn't lose a single post or photo. A little thanks goes to Google's cache and Bloglines for storing the latest posts that weren't in my latest backups.

So everyone, go spend 10 minutes right now (or at least soon) and make sure you really do have a backup of everything safe somewhere. And move it off your web server too. Not a single thing was recoverable from my crashed drive.

Lesson learned. No informal backup systems for me now!