'100% Data Loss' for Coding Horror Site

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’100% Data Loss’ for Coding Horror Site

’100% Data Loss’ for Coding Horror Site
- By: Rich Miller
  December 11th, 2009
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The popular programmer blog Coding Horror has experienced a “100 percent data loss” and is seeking to restore its content from search engine caches. Site maintainer Jeff Atwood is blaming CrystalTech, saying the hosting provider was not properly handling the backup process for his virtual machines. But Atwood also acknowledges that he “absolutely should have done complete offsite backups … all my backups were unfortunately on the server itself, so save the lecture, you’re 100% absolutely right, but that doesn’t help me at the moment.”

Atwood believes he will be able to recover the text of his blog posts from web search caches, but says the same technique will not work for images, and is seeking help in finding a way to recover archived images from his site. The data loss also affected the blog for the Stack Overflow forum operated by Atwood and Joel Spolsky.
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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

Coding Horrors? No kidding! | Standalone Sysadmin

Posted December 12th, 2009

[...] seems that Coding Horror had a bit of an issue the other day, to the tune of roughly 100% data loss. [...]

Jason

Posted December 12th, 2009

Does anyone else find the irony of the event and the site name to be slightly amusing?

Matt Simmons

Posted December 12th, 2009

Yes.

I feel sorry for them, honestly. I set up jobs automatically to backup my stuff, but I didn’t schedule them to go offsite. I just do it manually every once in a while. At least, I did until now

I’m going to setup an S3 account to offload stuff to. Learn from others’ mistakes.