It’s been an interesting fortnight.

Two weeks ago, my server host’s hard disk array decided to give up the ghost and take six weeks of backups with it to the Great Hardware Dump in the Sky.

This was only mildly annoying in the case of this site considering I haven’t been updating it frequently but it was very aggravating in the case of the toy link blog I edit (which is also hosted on the same shared server) since that site is updated five days a week.

I was annoyed my host kept mum about the issue for over 12 hours, incensed when I discovered that my host’s claim that it had restored content from a recent weekly backup was false, and this escalated to cartoon-style steam-out-the-ears anger when my host erroneously billed me again for hosting services. (I had paid my annual hosting fees a few days before this.)

Then a short while after that something happened that put it all in proper perspective. Life has a way of doing that, I guess.

Still, what did we learn from this episode, Orko?

Well, He-Man, first of all, we should never trust our server host’s hardware, backups or claims.

Backing up a WordPress database is a quick and easy process, so depending on the importance of your content to you or your readers, and your update frequency, you should make it a point to backup your database on a weekly or monthly basis. I didn’t do this, He-Man, and I have no one to blame but myse- … Skeletor.

Damn that evil skull-faced Lord of Destruction.

On a side note, He-Man, if you’re restoring a WordPress backup, consider using Opera instead of Firefox. Firefox 3.0.3 crashed on me as I was restoring a relatively recent Fuyoh.net WordPress backup whereas Opera 9.52 managed to complete the process without any drama.