Why you should always backup..
May 23rd, 2006
Saturday afternoon 20th May 2006: our site goes down so I contact the web hosting company (web-mania).
They are slow to respond but once they do, they fix it pretty quickly – I ask them what the problem was, their response:
technical difficulties that have been resolved.
Well, it was around lunch time today when I tried to log on to purplemass.com and guess what?
The site was down – so I kept trying most of the afternoon and then BAM!
The site is back up but I’m looking at pages that are 6 months old!!!!
So naturally, I try to get in touch with Web-Mania and their response for the sudden back-to-the-past phenomenon is:
———————————
Unfortunately the hard drive was giving errors last night and we had to attempt to repair the hard drive before the hard drive became corrput, during the scan several bad secortos were repaired on the hard drive, unfortunatley data on those sectors will have been changed.
If we had left the hard drive though all data on it would have been lost, so it was esential that we attempted the repair before.
Sorry for inconvenience faced with web-mania. Upload your data on web space.
You will have to restore you data from backup.
Thanks a lot for your co-operation
———————————
Unbelievable!!
Basically, as I was foolish enough not to back-up over the past couple of months when we made most of the updates and well, that’s that…
Still cannot believe these web-mania people and how they do *not* in any shape or form take responsibility for maintaining their servers and then making sure that their customers data is protected (they call themselves the affordable and reliable web hosting company) – good Lordee!
Anyway, I’ll probably write a letter to their bosses but I’m not optimistic if they’ll even acknowledge that they’ve been very very slack…
5 Responses to “Why you should always backup..”
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May 23rd, 2006 at 1:47 am
‘Live chat’ conversation with web-mania:
Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with ‘Shawn’
Shawn: Hello! Welcome to Web-Mania Live Chat Service. How may I help you today?
you: Hello. There seems to be a problem with my website: ww.purplemass.com – on saturday your server was down and my site stopped working – this was subsequently fixed when we spoke to one of your colleages. The problem now is that the site was again down earlier today and now it’s showing paes from October last year!!
Shawn: Unfortunately the hard drive was giving errors last night and we had to attempt to repair the hard drive before the hard drive became corrput,
Shawn: during the scan several bad secortos were repaired on the hard drive, unfortunatley data on those sectors will have been changed.
Shawn: If we had left the hard drive though all data on it would have been lost, so it was esential that we attempted the repair before.
Shawn: Sorry for inconvenience faced with web-mania. Upload your data on web space.
Shawn: You will have to restore you data from backup.
Shawn: Thanks a lot for your co-operation
you: What? You mean all the data is lost??? This is not good as my site was a blog depending on a SQL database – can you please restore this to your last backups..
Shawn: Sorry, but we do not keep backup…
you: How can a web-hosting company not do any backups??? How is it that you have backups from last October and not any more recent ones?
Shawn: Please co-operate with us..
you: What do you suggest I do? Any ideas?
you: i understand the need for repair before it became corrupt, as you say above. So therefore it wasn’t corrupt at the time, why didn’t you back it up then, before attempting a repair. we would have then kept the data, you would have then repaired the drive and then restored the data ?
Shawn: If you have backup at your end then please upload for the same
you: we don’t , otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem, why did you not backup non-corrupt data before attempting a repair?
you: are you there?
Shawn: yeas
you: i hope you understand my frustration – it seems that web-mania.com do not back up their data on a regular basis (you obviously have a copy of my website from October 2005). Do you think it’s at all possible that you have a more recent version of the webites you’ve lost? Your help at this stage is greatly appreciated
Chat session has ended.
You are not currently in a chat session.
May 23rd, 2006 at 6:23 pm
they just ended the chat like that?
May 23rd, 2006 at 6:39 pm
They did! I guess I did get a bit angry in the first place but no need for them behaving like that…
May 24th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
dead unprofessional. Not just the chat, but the whole episode.
May 27th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
I just read their reason for the corruption. Is webmania some kid with server software running on their old pc or something? They should have some kind of RAID or automated backup schedule and the first thing you do when you think a hardrive is failing is backup what’s on it…