
How to lose and recover your blog in 30 minutes - maplebed
http://antirez.com/news/65
======
fsckin
Damn... After I think I've got all the knobs set "just right", I'll always
reboot just to see what happens.

This usually catches various common problems not quite as serious as this
one... daemon doesn't start, kernel panics, more updates required after boot,
etc.

The last time I had something like this happen, needing to restore from a
weekly backup, Google or Archive.org had already cached everything new and I
was able to recover it all without much hassle.

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HorizonXP
And a blog requires a Redis back-end because?

I've hosted my blog on S3 & CloudFront for a while now without issue. Comments
are hosted by Disqus, and the static files are generated using Pelican.

Seriously, unless you're using your blog as a massive CMS, why not use static
files?

~~~
zemo
this is the blog of the guy that wrote Redis.

~~~
HorizonXP
Well then that's somewhat acceptable. Somewhat.

~~~
gamache
Oh, admit it. Antirez wrote a hell of a blogging platform.

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kijin
The Wayback Machine has numerous caches of his website, dating back over 7
years. This should be good enough to restore all the timestamps to within 24
hours of their original values, as well as catch anything that Google's cache
might have missed.

[https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://antirez.com](https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://antirez.com)

~~~
antirez
That is helpful, thanks! I'll recover the dates...

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dice
If the comments are outsourced then why have a backend at all? Just pop all of
the posts into an S3 bucket and update the index when creating a new one. No
server needed.

~~~
bsg75
Dogfooding his own project I would assume.

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manuelflara
Funnily enough, just yesterday a friend of mine just told me that a few years
ago the database of a blog community he runs got corrupted and had to be
recovered. Unfortunately, the server where he was sending his backups got full
like 3 months prior and he didn't know, so he had basically lost 3 months of
data. He recovered most posts checking Google Cache too. And yes, now he has
all the systems properly set up with alerts, proper backups and such :)

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agentile
So really ... google cache to the rescue...

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hackula1
I got distracted and was looking at your other posts, when I noticed that the
5 or so I had looked at all said "1 day ago". I thought you must be a lunatic
until I actually went back and read this post and saw that your dates had been
lost. :)

------
aidos
It's funny, for all the work that goes into some things simpler is so often
better. I've had a lot of value out of the content antirez has posted on his
blog - all along it was just a block of unformatted text.

------
etler
What I love about Jekyll and Github pages is I get all the backup that git
provides. The likelyhood of me losing my hard drive data and Github losing my
data at the same time are nil.

------
hackula1
I have lost a couple blogs over the years, mostly out of laziness, letting
them expire. I got an itch to write some posts recently and wanted to set up a
new site. This time around I decided I would do it with something git
friendly, so that I could throw it on github and forget about it if I lost
interest. I wrote a "from scratch" site with this in mind and it was working
well, so I open sourced the core engine today. It runs on express and is about
as bare bones as it gets.
[http://morganherlocker.com/post/badblog](http://morganherlocker.com/post/badblog)

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borplk
I'm surprised he isn't using a static website

~~~
auxbuss
Salvatore (antirez) had a nice pithy response to that:

    
    
      oh, static systems are for people that don't have fast databases ;-)
    

[https://twitter.com/antirez/status/407184116275503104](https://twitter.com/antirez/status/407184116275503104)

~~~
qznc
My database is called ext4. It is plenty fast for a blog. :-)

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jheriko
"simple systems are really better than complex systems when something bad
happens"

isn't that super ironic? that by configuring something in a stupidly elaborate
way you had a problem...

redis may be super stable but cosmic ray neutrons are a thing and they will
screw you one day eventually. :)

surely the real saviour here is the internet and its ability to keep crusty
old data alive for you through caching and such...

------
markwakeford
Pretty fulfilling recovery ? Well done maplebed, lesson learnt and problem
resolved.

My least proudest moment quote a while ago was when I realised I just binned a
directory I had been writing some code in few files in it, But had them all
open in an editor. Recreated the directory and hit save in each tab. _phew,
disaster avoided_

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username42
I love his conclusion "Without to mention that now I know I don't have to
enable backups as I can recovery everything."

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lamby
So those distro packages are looking quite appealing after all...

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grecy
mmm. I have 242 posts published on my blog, with over 3000 moderated comments.
I'd rather not have to copy-paste all that back in.

