In this digital world, making backups of my work is a necessity. I am amazed when I hear that people still don’t do it. Luckily I do, and it saved my ass.
Quitting my job has left me scrambling to make sure everything surrounding my new choice of career was in place. The blog, the social media I had covered. But my website, plus all the associated marketing material surrounding it, wasn’t quite done. I had been burning a little too much of the midnight oil and I was exhausted.
Finally, last week, the new website was ready to go live. I had been storing it in a temporary location on my server to test it in a semi-live state. So, naturally I removed the files associated with it, plus my old, stale website. My FTP program went about its business, deleting files without question, when I noticed that files from my blog were being deleted. To my horror, I realized that I had just deleted everything. I had burned up all my midnight oil and everything went dark. I was so tired, I failed to see my blog folder stuck in the middle of the files I had chosen to delete. It was like a page out of Pixar’s RM* story (Google it).
I hit quit as fast as I could, but the damage was done. The blog portion of my website had had its heart ripped out.
Fuck.
I had been blogging for over eight months and I didn’t know how much of it was gone. For a brief instant, my heart stopped beating. But then I remembered that, lucky for me, I run a daily backup of my blog, and the last time it ran was a hour before I hit “delete” without thinking.
Time to rebuild. I was up for another 3 hours rebuilding what I lost, but I got it all back.
The lesson: Back up your work… oh, and get more sleep! 😉
Photo by Tim Reckmann
