I was following instructions for a security upgrade, and got to the point I thought I should push the ‘do-it’ button. I nearly wiped my whole identity, which would have taken the page with it. I made a belated move to stop it, but in the process, I lost a bunch of sub-pages, just lost, gone, with all attached comments! I am so sorry!
I have reconstituted the generic book discussion page, and trust you guys to fill it with brilliant threads. I will reconstitute others as I think of them, or as you remind me.
Having nearly sunk the ship, I am now going to take the recommended rest, and hope to persuade Jane to do the same…though I know she will not until she gets her own book up. She has diverted herself for the last 3 days working on MY stuff and the spambot attack, and is so very tired. I wish I could help her, but she’s doing author-type corrections that I can’t do for her. I am trying to do the office cleanup, at least, and to do some house cleanup…
That’s scary! What if it had been the new Bren file?
Please take some time off to rest, the both of the two of you! This is the downside of being your own boss and working from home: you’ve been going on and on, full steam ahead, working twice as long days as us wage-slaves, and without the weekends off.
The heavens won’t come down if the books go up a few days later, but working with computers when you’re this tired is pure dangerous – you get accident-prone and that’ll cause a lot more work and time-lost than taking time off for rest and relaxation.
I’m very happy you’ve finished Bren’s current story, so now please relax and get into Nationals-watching and relaxing mood; and please try to break Jane out of her over-focused overworked mindset as well. So what if the stupid spambot makes our nice avatars disappear for a while? As long as it’s not actively causing more damage as long as it’s in there, there seems to be no great hurry to clearing it out.
I love visiting your blogs, but if you guys need a few days off from computers to get yourselves back together and relaxed, we don’t mind: ultimately, it’s to our profit as readers if you’re in good form and feeling well.
As you noticed in the page-hits and reactions a while ago, a lot of us readers take most every weekend off, which I haven’t noticed you doing in months!
Eeek. Close call. I think Hanneke’s suggestion is solid – take a rest and recharge your batteries. I’ve seen people so tired they can barely eat and yet happily working away on computer systems – the results are not normally good. So rest, celebrate completing Bren part 348 and take it easy
Big sigh of relief, and thirding the suggestion for rest and relaxation. We’re not going away any time soon. What would Banichi say?
WOW! Lovecraft has nothing on you for scary! I’m with Hanneke…..rest…play…breathe 🙂 😀 😆
It’s funny you say that, smartcat, because I’m just re-reading At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft today! 😆
I was about suggesting http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cherryh.com as a source for the lost content, but your site is no longer actively stored there. Sorry for the loss. Is there a backup feature somewhere in WordPress? If so, I’d recommend using it regularly. Alternatively, do a regular ftp dump of the entire webspace to one of your local machines.
It seems not all is lost. Example: http://new.wavewithoutashore.cwgservices.org/?page_id=820&cpage=1#comments is still there (that’s from the alliance-union book discussion). Only the link in the left column is missing. Use as search term in google to find the pages. It should be possible to rescue most of the comments. There are some comments actually missing on cherryh.com but might still be in the google cache, but those will have to be stored quickly (prior to th e next cache refresh).
Bad example. That one can be reached via the link on the top of the page. I’ve got local copies of pages 1, 3 and 5 of the “general spoiler alert” discussion, though. And some more, but it’s getting late here (10:32pm).
You are not kidding CJ. This very thing just happened to Mr. Kato. He went in to simply change the domain name redirect. Saw a security update and went for it. Poof….gone. The whole thing. And not a personal site mind you.
Something is amiss. I have loved WordPress, so much easier than going back to HTML and coding by hand–but if this is this risk….it has given me serious pause.
The only thing I can say is—before you do a WP operation, take no direction: READ the entire screen and double-check your options before hitting ‘go’. Jane, in Groundties, in the universal ‘Net, has (I think) Stephen observe that someone never had learned that the PROGIMP command was not a retrievable condition…
WP is a wonderful but undocumented software.
Fourthing (or whatevering) the “be sure to take some time for yourself to rest” comments, CJ. As I said before: greedy wretches that we are, we expect to get years and years of use out of you and Jane. If that means we miss a day of blog output, or have to wait a bit longer for Norway patches 😀 or e-book downloads, well that’s just the price we have to pay!
#
I would think that there’s a way to periodically grab and save down a snapshot of the blog en toto… Might be worth a look! Mightn’t that just come down to a weekly backup of a specific folder of your company computer?
😉
From: Your faithful staff ,
We urgently recommend that you rest .
Now , CJ-ji , Now !
Staff .
relax and recharge, maybe even take a self-declared vacation offline from the internet. don’t worry, we’ll be here when you get back 🙂
Actually, Lynn says she has a backup! She’s our site manager, and she thinks she can reconstitute the missing pages. Yay! if she can…
I was at least able to skate today without breaking my neck…pulled a muscle, but stretched it out and kept going, and it felt pretty good at the last. We were on the concrete-based rink today, faster, harder, more brittle ice; I did not come near falling today, and am getting some of my moves steadied down.
The importance of backups cannot be overstated. I have been known to put OS on a new, unused hard drive, copy all data files over to it and put it in a drawer pending the inevitable day everything crashes. Incremental backups are a problem in this scenario, but that’s why I’ve got external drives. However, when the apocalypse arrives I won’t be reinstalling laboriously, just shove the new drive in, boot up and move over any of the interim data files I need, and then make time to create a new emergency backup hard drive.
A USB converter for IDE or SATA drives will set you back maybe $20, and that lets you test and recover data from unbootable drives, too. An excellent investment.
Yay for your admin for having backups!
I’m glad that things are looking better for the future! May this never happen to you again!
Thanks goes to Lynn!
Jcrow9,there IS the very thing that grabs an entire page or a designated portion. I er grabbed
it. It’s called “ScreenGrab”. I love it,I used to
save stuff and would get bits and pieces all lined up under it’s name. SceenGrab saves every
thing as a whole.
that is VERY scary … I hope you are getting some proper rest now ….
I use wordpress, but it was all set up for me so I don’t tinker
CJ, I don’t know if you have this functionality, but my site provider keeps an archive of my site on their server for X number of days, actually, I think it’s more like XX number of days.
They’re stored as a .zip file, and if I have a problem where my data on my hard drive is corrupted, I can download the last good upload and redo only the things I need to redo.
Again, without knowing your situation, I would check to see if there is an archive on the server. I did look at http://www.archive.org, but they normally do not have archives until 6 months or so.