One of the worst moments for any webmaster is the server break down or server hard disk crash on which their website is hosted. Recently TechBuzz had that problem. If you tried visiting the site over the weekend, you’d have noticed that the site was down. We are still recovering from the hard disk crash and things seem to be moving at a slow pace. According to my host, everything should be up and running fine in the next 48 hrs and I too hope so.
When the first level of data restoration for TechBuzz was done, the restoration date was set to previous weeks Sunday, which was a week ago, which meant my latest weeks data was not there. I spoke to my host and they assured that everything would work fine, and I had to wait for another 10 – 16 hrs. I really was not comfortable with this, and I started searching ways to recover as much data as possible.
I did not have the back up of the content that I had published, and neither did I have the URL of the links I had published, two mistakes.
Luckily, this one step, helped me recover 80% – 90% of the lost data.
Google Feedburner: When I created an account, I had become a member of my own list and had opted to receive daily updates via e-mail. This was helpful as I could pull the URL of my previous posts, and then go to www.Google.com and search each of those URLs. Most of my URL’s were indexed and there was a cached version present !
This saved a lot of my hard work going down the drain. Those who do not have the Feedburner email delivery opted, they can try searching for their websites Sitemap.xml, this too had data till about last 2 days.
Lesson learnt :
Always keep a backup of the published articles and weekly back-up of your content on your websites. It may not take more than 10 – 15 mins, but will save you a lot of headache !