What makes you happy ?

Earlier the server this blog sits on disappeared for some time. When it came back the blog was reverted back 24 hours at least. (I also lost email for the period – it’s IMAP – but there’s plenty more where it came from). I have a cron backup every night my time which is sent to a gmail account just for backups. Once I noticed that I’d lost 2 posts and several comments I got the backup file. The .gz file was 4.5mb and it unzips to 18mb. And therein lies the problem.

I could upload the .gz file and import that to the database as I have ssh access. That would take as long as it took to upload. Minutes then.
If I had not got shell access then I’d probably send a ticket, wait to be told to upload the file and send the host the name and location of the file, then email them back with that and wait for them to execute the import. That could lose even more comments. And this is with someone who does the proper thing and backs up their blog nightly.
So when the host breaks the server and reverts you, is having that backup practical? How much effort to go to just to replace a post or two? If the above effort really is too much then the backup can only be looked on as a catastrophe backup. Not a bad thing but maybe I should certainly be telling people who I help out that it is a last hope thing, not a fallback for the loss of a post or 3.

So, my cron job now runs every 6 hours and I need to backup my mail better. This hasn’t happened to me with IMAP before and I don’t want to run it all through Gmail either so there must be a setting in Thunderbird to really actually download it.

And I didn’t include backups of other files. Depends on how you view these things I suppose. And if you made a comment in the last 24-30 hours and it’s gone, that’s why.