I made an unpleasant discovery this morning. The rox.com website was down. Looked like a problem with the database. Upon further investigation, I discovered that all the data tables were gone. The database itself was still there, but the thirty-odd data tables which it contained had vanished. Poof. Gone.
I called tech support for our webhost. The first tier guy I talked to immediately recognized the severity of the problem, and soon I was exchanging e-mails with a sysadmin named Sergey.
Yes, the database is empty. However we didn’t delete it. I advise you to restore your database from backup.
Sigh. I was afraid he’d say that. I asked if there was anyway he could restore the data. And I gave him the sob story. You know: My life has been disrupted from Hurricane Katrina because I live in New Orleans and my house was flooded. I’m not sure when or where my last backup of the database even is right now. All of which is true. Looking around on my hard drive here at work, I found a backup — from September 2003. Needless to say, the thought of losing two and a half years of data made me a little queasy.
Sergey wrote back:
We don’t provide restoration services for free. However, I’ve decided to restore the database for free, because you are from New Orleans. Please be more careful next time and make backups from time to time.
So, sometimes it pays to play the New Orleans card.
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I was wondering about the site, your blog was down too. Don’t feel bad about playing the NO card. You deserve to, I’m sure there are many more who play that card for more significant things than a website database. BTW, season 1 is still a WIP. I think I will use the old software due to it’s familiarity. That’s still a tossup though. Take it easy B…