My hosting company, Mediatemple, has upgraded their shared hosting service to a new hosting service they call grid-server. The new package has some nice upgrades and all shared hosting customers will have to migrate at some point down the line, so I opted to migrate my 4 sites over last night. The process is simple enough, and they do most of the work. In hindsight, the simplicity was a bit too tantalizing. So, I threw caution to the wind started the migration process without backing anything up. All 171 posts of this site were in the balance, and after the 25 minute migration process (minus the initial 12-hour 1st step that adjusts DNS entries for your affected domain names), they were gone.

Somewhere in the migration process, my database was corrupted beyond repair and when I went to robknight.net it was gone.

To make a long, sad story short, I'm glad I'm with Mediatemple, because they had my site back up and in fine shape this afternoon and all is well. It was the only hiccup in moving 200MB of data from their shared-server setup to their new grid-server setup. And now I will be making regular backups of my database to avoid any future calamities.

One thing that struck me as I pondered the destruction of this site -- how much of my life is here. I hadn't realized that I had over 150 posts in 2+ years of blogging. This is my diary, and so many of my thoughts are here, it was like I had actually lost something tangible. I think I considered this just a place where I ranted about politics. But instead, I was leaving myself in these posts. I just sort of passed it off as meaningless because no one ever read it. And I didn't care that no one read it, but I also made the mistake of thinking it wouldn't matter if I lost it.

This place represents a snapshot of 172 moments of my life. I will treat it as such from now on.