Arggggggggg

[Sean]

I'm so confused right now, I don't know what I should do. I queried about my server being down to my host and it turns out my hard drive crashed. I don't have any local back ups which basically means I'm screwed. Literally 7 months of 10+ hours a day, 7 days a week work basically all down the drain... Just as I was about to launch my biggest site too.

I guess I'm posting this for a lesson/warning to the people who are thinking "aw, I'll just start making local back ups next week, nothings gonna happen" (if there is anyone who is as dumb as I was about this to think this).

I'm basically at ground 0 again. Right now, I don't even feel like rebuilding everything... I'm not sure where to start or what to do. I guess it's just another lesson learned. Better now than 5 months from now when I'm even further along... it's just so annoying heh

[Billyray]

Tough break Sean. Don't know if this link helps you or your situation: waybackmachine is an archive of most websites (in case you didn't know).

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Anyone set up an automated back up that gets sent to their gmail or yahoo mail account?

[Sean]

Tough break Sean. Don't know if this link helps you or your situation: waybackmachine is an archive of most websites (in case you didn't know).

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Anyone set up an automated back up that gets sent to their gmail or yahoo mail account?
I checked and none of my sites are archived. Thanks for the tip anyway, I completely forgot about the wayback machine. The main problem is going to be remaking all the coding and databases that were lost... especially for the new site I was going to launch next month.

On a side note, I did find some useful files in my temporary internet files.

[Chris]

sometimes the hd is recoverable.

[Sean]

They said that there was no way to recover the data, but I'll go double check... could be worth a shot.

[Chris]

well.. maybe they couldn't... but you could always ask for the harddrive and send it yourself to a data recovery service. Its not cheap... but then again losing that many hours of work isn't cheap either.

[Chris]

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-44,GGLD:en&q=hard+drive+recovery

[Elvie]

You can also use Google's cache to retrieve at least your html source code and images.
Hopefully you can recover the data from the hard drive.
Good luck!

[Masetek]

You can also use Google's cache to retrieve at least your html source code and images.


Good suggestion.

I agree with Chris, get them to send you the HDD. If you're willing to pay, Im sure theres about a 90% chance that you can get the data off it. Ive seen hard disks from fires and ones that look theyve been run over by trucks and they have still contained most of their data.

[moonshield]

^ Indeed. I had a hard drive failure on one of my servers two weeks ago. I had most of it backed up, but I had made some major updates since my last backup. Google cache is very helpful.

Good luck.

[Nico]

Like everyone said above, ask for your hard drive and send it to a recovery company or recover it yourself. I've done this in the past Several times. Im pretty sure you can recover a lot.

If you are doing it yourself, just make sure to not install absolutely anything in the HD. Every time you write to your hd you'll be overwritting your old data.

Nicolas

[r2d2]

I have recovered files before using freeware tools - this is from a linux/win install disaster (it was a while ago but IIRC, win got huffy about having a linux partition, and started formatting the whole drive or something) and deletion (proper delete, not recycle bin!).

[dc dalton]

Doesn't your hosting company do daily backups? and if they dont WHY NOT!

YEs hard drives can be recovered, Ive used action forward and they do some amazing things but of course they arent cheap.

Now whether your hosting company would even give your the drive is beyond me but I doubt it highly ........ personally I would NEVER host (and I own a hosting company) with ANYONE who didn't do redundant daily backups!