How to lose and recover your blog in 30 minutes

Damn... After I think I&#x27;ve got all the knobs set &quot;just right&quot;, I&#x27;ll always reboot just to see what happens.<p>This usually catches various common problems not quite as serious as this one... daemon doesn&#x27;t start, kernel panics, more updates required after boot, etc.<p>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.

And a blog requires a Redis back-end because?<p>I&#x27;ve hosted my blog on S3 &amp; CloudFront for a while now without issue. Comments are hosted by Disqus, and the static files are generated using Pelican.<p>Seriously, unless you&#x27;re using your blog as a massive CMS, why not use static files?

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&#x27;s cache might have missed.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://antirez.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;*&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com</a>

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.

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&#x27;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 :)

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

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

It&#x27;s funny, for all the work that goes into some things simpler is so often better. I&#x27;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.

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.

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 &quot;from scratch&quot; 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. <a href="http://morganherlocker.com/post/badblog" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;morganherlocker.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;badblog</a>

I&#x27;m surprised he isn&#x27;t using a static website

&quot;simple systems are really better than complex systems when something bad happens&quot;<p>isn&#x27;t that super ironic? that by configuring something in a stupidly elaborate way you had a problem...<p>redis may be super stable but cosmic ray neutrons are a thing and they will screw you one day eventually. :)<p>surely the real saviour here is the internet and its ability to keep crusty old data alive for you through caching and such...

Pretty fulfilling recovery ? Well done maplebed, lesson learnt and problem resolved.<p>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. <i>phew, disaster avoided</i>

I love his conclusion &quot;Without to mention that now I know I don&#x27;t have to enable backups as I can recovery everything.&quot;

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

mmm. I have 242 posts published on my blog, with over 3000 moderated comments. I&#x27;d rather not have to copy-paste all that back in.