Update – March 3, 2005, 8 am: Thanks to the tireless efforts of some really talented people including Foofy, the master FooBuilder, the site is back online. (He is the best, in case you need someone for design work and PHP programming!) Some of the archives are still to go online, but soon. The data from 2002-to-2004 is in the archives, and so are posts from past two days. The disk is on its way to the hard drive ER, and well, RackSpace has worked with me through the night to get everything back online. There is a lot of you have wrote in with your kind words, and offers to help. My gratitude. And my apologies for putting you all through this. I know you might have to re-sign for the site, so I apologize in advance. I am sad about the loss of comments and other juicy stuff which makes writing a blog worth writing. Still, something is better than nothing. On another note, Tablatronic.Net and TheBroadband Blog are off the air till further notice, or when the data recovery finishes.
What a day – day from hell is more like it. After being in meetings all day long, I came back home to dozens of emails: GigaOM down! Why? I went to the site, and it was all dark and quiet. A quick email to RackSpace, and well they said we are looking into it. A few minutes later – a phone call. Bad news buddy, your hard drive is fried. Good News, we have you live on another server. But here is the rub. All your data is gone! Can you all hear me now……Well, I thought there might be a back-up? Support dude tells me – you didn’t ask for it, so you don’t get it.
Good point, except I thought data centers do back-ups. Nevertheless, why blame anyone else when I am the dumb ass. I did not back up anything when I should have. Stupidity should not have any excuse, including my own. Anyway I have the back-ups up until end of 2004, so that’s a good start. Foofy helped me scroll through the Google and MSN cache and has recovered most of the stuff from the site since then. I reposted most recent stuff, which comes via Feedster cache.
So this is going to be one painful, time wasting process and well, all those wonderful pingbacks etc – all gone. Google Rank gone to hell. Oh incidentally, if you were wondering – Tablatronic, and TheBroadbandBlog are off the air as well. I am not sure how to get those documents back.
It is all good. No Biggie!
Ouch. No backup? I kind of agree with you, though… its 2005. Isn’t everything everywhere backed up? I find it hard to believe you’re not automatically backed up. What if the datacenter caught on fire? They don’t backup their own business (let alone what they offer you)? That’s ridiculous. Anyway, if you can’t get further back, you might try your Archives at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://gigaom.com
Obviously, a tedious process. Oh well. Also, check this out… http://thisisgoingtobebig.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/six_apart_joins.html Perhaps you should open a Friendster account and blog on their free version of Typepad for a while. 🙂
Om, Very sorry to hear about this disaster! Glad to see that you are up and running now. We look forward to the new future posts. To the roads ahead…
bryan
Sorry to hear about the loss. I would have also thought a company as good and big as Rackspace would do automatic updates.
Found this in the cache
I guess you’re not feeling the love anymore.
no backup by default? that’s pure crap..
rt
Well, I am at fault here so nothing I can do to basically over come the dumbness on my part. well, every day its a new beginning
Hey Om,
I might have almost daily backups of all your web pages in my FooBar Search Alerts cache. Its a bit painful, but I can dig through the cache manually and retrieve the pages. Let me know if you need it. Good day 🙂
anand thanks for the help. if you see any missing from the site, from past one week can you email me back those whenever possible. appreciate your help
I have every one of your posts since late last year in my Newsgator folder in outlook – it would be trivial to forward them all to you. Email me at jasonepowell at gmail.com if you would like me to do so!
Incidentally, this, if for no other reason, is why I love RSS Feeds – it’s like you have copies of everything everywhere!
Maybe you can recover if bloglines has cached everything…?
I had a few articles cached in RSS, but it looks like you have better offers than mine. I’d mail them to you, but I can’t find an email address for you (contacts link is 404)
Two kinds of hard disks – those that have failed, and those that will. Now to back up my PowerBook onto a DVD 🙂