I host my own Word Press blogs on a site a started for a side computer business. It has a lot of information on it, so I just keep it going.

Last night I was adding a graphic I located to my post for yesterday and in the middle of updating, something happened.

So instead of uploading the notes I made for five or six new posts over yesterday’s lunch break, I dealt with a problem. “Joy”.

I got on the control panel at the web host and it looked like all my databases were empty, no tables nothing. Then it go to where I could not even see the front page of any of my 3 blogs, RPGs, genealogy, and one for the side business. It was not an outage and after logging a call and getting into a web chat, I was told it was being escalated. I tried one more time before I went to bed and it was working. If my web host did anything on their end, they did not tell me.

That just reinforces the concept: BACKUP YOUR DATA. Thankfully I had most of it backed up, but while I waited, I backed up all the static pages and once it was working again, made sure I had backups on my PC and in my email. I was a little stressed to think about all the posts for the D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop might be gone, and my efforts to prepare for the April, 2014 A to Z challenge. I’m a tech guy, so I “know” better. I did well enough that I would not lose anything. But I also know you have to VERIFY the data.

In my day job, the company that I work for has a remote backup service we offer our clients. There have been too many times that I have had to point out to clients that because they refused to use our service, that because they did not verify their backups BEFORE their server crashed, there is nothing I can do. A year ago, I had a client whose best backup was 15 months old and they had to re-build 15 months of accounting data. Their raid had a drive fail, and their IT person in charge did not know what he was doing and got it so messed up that a data recovery service could not get any newer data, mostly because they never made sure the data was actually backed up. A couple months ago another client had a server failure and the only copy of data was 4 years old. Thankfully, $5,000 later, they had their most recent data recovered by a service.

If you use an online blogging tool, like Blogger or a WordPress hosted blog, be sure you backup too, just in case.

I have had my own share of oopsies. About ten years ago I installed Linux in a dual boot configuration, and I did something wrong and lost my Windows partition. Of course, it was not backed up. I lost a year’s worth of email because at the time you couldn’t store that much email online.

Are you a techy and know better? What is your best, “I shot myself in the foot.” story?