Ugly In So Many Ways

Monday, 22 September 2008, 6:31 am
Tags: , ,

Yes Leoville is looking pretty awful. I’m reconstructing it from scratch. Fortunately, as you can see, all the posts survived the apocalyptic demise of my server’s RAID 5 Array. Unfortunately, none of the WordPress customizations did. So I’m downloading the plug-ins, restoring the template, hacking the CSS, and desperately trying to remember the changes I made.

All the comments are safe with Disqus and will return when I turn on the Disqus plug-in. (Done. Thanks, Disqus!)

Unfortunately, the image directory was not saved. That means all the attached images will be blank. I will be able to recreate some of them from my local archives, but most are lost forever. -sigh-

All of this is because I was too cheap to buy the many gigabytes of storage required to backup that data. It was a false economy. I’ve purchased 200GB of storage from my host, Softlayer, at the extortionate rate of $180/month. (That’s twice what a hard drive of that size would cost outright – 2400% more per year – and I thought the cell phone companies were bad.) And I’ll be setting up rsync and S3 for a secondary backup, as well.

Meanwhile it’s back to the depressing and very time consuming work of fixing this place up again. Now I know, in a very small way, how it must feel to survive a hurricane.

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14 Responses to “Ugly In So Many Ways”

  1. hoyzing on September 22nd, 2008 9:03 am

    Don't worry Leo. It'll go much quicker this time. You've already done it once. ;-)

  2. Livable on September 22nd, 2008 10:26 am

    Good luck, Leo!

  3. peterh_oz on September 22nd, 2008 10:51 am

    Why don't you Carbonite it? A server is “just a computer” so they should allow that … They're a sponsor on your radio show. http://www.Carbonite.com

  4. wirelessphil on September 22nd, 2008 5:52 pm

    Wish could help, but I can't do much from Ohio.

  5. Gavin Knight on September 22nd, 2008 6:46 pm

    why not jungle disk for your backups? much much cheaper

  6. John W on September 22nd, 2008 8:29 pm

    Don't worry about the look Leo…the magic is in the words, not the window dressing.

  7. jonbrown on September 24th, 2008 10:35 am

    Don't worry about the website complications Leo. I'll still be a frequent visitor as always. Are you going to change the layout of the website too, or are you just going to focus on backups and reliability?

  8. Brendan on September 24th, 2008 11:56 am

    a hard drive in a cardboard box is a little different than storage space on a server. You should check out mosso.com for hosting all your domains.

  9. Peppery on September 25th, 2008 3:10 am

    Jungledisk is simply an interface to Amazon S3, which Leo states that he is also using.

    Also, I'd imagine that Jungledisk isn't designed for servers.

  10. luclatulippe on September 25th, 2008 2:52 pm

    Hey Leo, love the shows and big fan. Site's looking good. I know the pain, I'm redoing mine right now.

    If you need any illustrations done, let me know, it's what I do for a living. It would be a pleasure to do some work for you, give something back for all the great podcasts. :) Check out the likenesses I did of Steve & Allan at Less Everything: http://b.lesseverything.com/

  11. leolaporte on September 28th, 2008 1:17 am

    Thanks. I've fixed it.

  12. leolaporte on September 28th, 2008 1:19 am

    I think Softlayer is fantastic – if expensive. I have two dedicated servers. Both Quad core Xeons with 100Mbps connections and 2TB/month bandwidth for $1000/month. Softlayer is quick to fix any hardware problems, but I don't buy managed service. I'm responsible for my own backup and software maintenance. I prefer it that way because that's one of the ways I learn how to do stuff!

  13. handyman321 on October 23rd, 2008 1:24 pm

    Perhaps because Carbonite is not what it claims to be? I have had a 6 month ordeal trying to restore data. They say my ISP has them throttled to 350 kps. I am getting 2% of my data a day! I have spent HOURS online and on the phone with my ISP and C. When the ISP tests I have 1792/448 when I test online with servers around the world I have an average 1300/375 speed. Who should I believe?

  14. matthew on October 26th, 2008 3:25 pm

    CrashPlan is SO much better than Carbonite or JungleDisk –
    Backup on-site, off-site and online — no monthly fees with your own destinations.

    It has better compression, faster backup & restores, and most importantly – WORKS.

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