I hate that expression, 'Dropping the ball', but it's the only one for this week. I almost lost my whole web site, nine years worth of stuff, in a couple of days. Here I am, making a living off IT skills' *snort* and I've managed to put off taking a complete backup of all my data for years.
Thanks to a great little GNU gadget called wget I've been able to get everything, pretty much, back from around the Net. If anyone serious about their digital data collecting affliction then you could do a helluva lot worse than a one line disaster recovery script like
wget --mirror ftp://:@/ -o w
get.log --directory-prefix=mirror --wait=1
Fortunately I kicked this one off a year or so back because yesterday I needed it.
The web site (also acting as the mail server) got unplugged and thrown in a company liquidator's storeroom. No notice because hosting has been a free deal for me (with payback). No problem. We have another site. No we don't... liquidation happens on the first day of the month. A day after the contract expires on the disaster recovery host. By the time I call the ISP, the box is on the pile to be flushed. Lucky me. Box reconnected and 2.5Gigs of rather messy file collections is pulled back to safety. Ouch!
What would I have done if I had lost everything? Go to Jamaica? No, the sad truth is that I would have probably wasted another five years recreating what I'd liked about things first time around. Perhaps shedding skin has to be a conscious effort to be worthwhile.