Over the weekend my host’s server died and with it my website. So of course they had to bring another server online and restore from backup. Fortunately, I backed up my files right before the crash (and navigated the restoration process with the help of Turtle Meat’s “Fragments” how-to webpage – thanks, mon). I don’t think I lost any blog entries, but I did lose comments on a recent entry about Umbria tracking my posts.

The gist of that lost conversation was that Umbria had previously gotten the attention of a few of us (I knew they sounded familiar) back in June when BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker posted a Blogspotting entry about them.

Which brings me back to the current circumstances. Having been the on-again/off-again target of amateur hacks looking to cut their teeth on outdated and vulnerable code, it reminds me that should a website say something a corporate entity doesn’t like (e.g. “Burger King’s got the worst onion rings I’ve ever had”), they can’t even employ the services of a hacker to wipe files (not that a corporation would ever do anything illegal). Because assuming, say, I don’t back them up, and assuming my host didn’t back them up, there’s a good chance some netbot has already archived my post. In fact, that was going to be an option in the event I’d lost more than I did.

So two lessons (re)learned. First, back up your files frequently. Second, once it’s posted there’s no erasing it.