11:27 PM - Disaster Struck!
The hard drive died in the compaq server for JustJournal and my personal site last tuesday. The /usr partition was toasted including the mysql data files and all of the website data. fsck couldn't do anything with it.
In summary, the mysql data was destroyed containing journal entries. The most recent backup that was salvagable was from January 3rd, 2004. Anyone that signed up after that date or any journal entries posted after that date have been lost.
The source code for justjournal is backed up on my ibook and i was able to publish it back to the new hard drive.
how did it happen?
The 40 gig seagate IDE drive (OEM) failed. It appeared there were bad sectors on the disk. Modern IDE drives have extra sectors not usable that are automatically replaced when the drive detects problems. The limit was reached. Justjournal is housed at work and currently runs off of a DSL line on my PC running FreeBSD. The furnace has been out most of the winter and the roof has been leaking in the server room. These conditions are VERY bad for hard drives. There isn't much i can do about it because quite frankly I can't afford to get another colo setup like I had pre-november. The server also provides mail services for work and they were gracious enough to buy me a new drive since it was probably their fault.
I lost my data.. what are you going to do about it?
Not much. I can't go back in time and backup data more often. My mysql server has a root password and therefore i can't automate backups. I refuse to put a root password in a shell script. Its just dump. I may try to setup a user just for backups with read access. In the mean time, i will start backing up mysql and the jj webspace more frequently. I lost the web.xml mapping file as well which i had to rebuild. It is entirely my fault for not providing regular backups. In addition, I plan to start using the CD burner once a month to backup data in tar format and possibly using the unix dump command.
I also plan to add a way users can backup their own journal entries and retrieve all of their data so its not entirely on my head when this happens. I can't afford a tape drive or raid arrays as I don't make anything off of my websites including justjournal and foolishgames.com.
I appoligize for my mistake and hope to improve my administration skills in the future.
Also, there has been some loss of functionality in the short term. Posting and most of the preference systems should be back up tonight. Several tables are missing that weren't yet in existance in january. Comments are not working right now. I will try to get those working very soon.