I Borked My Blog
I got behind on my backups. I’m normally quite good about that but fell off recently. I was using an off-site backup service that was charging me an arm and a leg and the other arm as well,1 so I shut it down. I still haven’t come up with a great alternative and have been doing things manually in the meantime.
I was also using a personal cloud service (The Cloud Service) to keep my coding projects Sync-ed between computers, which is not a backup strategy, but it worked pretty well as a stopgap — until it didn’t.
At some point, The Cloud Service decided to delete all of my coding projects from both my laptops without notice. The files were still backed up to the cloud, of course. You’d assume the Sync-ing process works something like:
- Computer A uploads new files to The Cloud Service,
- The Cloud Service saves those files to the cloud,
- Computer B asks The Cloud Service for a list of the latest file changes,
- Then Computer B downloads the files from the cloud.
But maybe not. The last available save point on the cloud was from all the way back in April. Computer A and Computer B were both up to date, so I don’t know why The Cloud Service doesn’t have the recent deltas. Perhaps something went awry.
The consequence of all this is that the next time I run the static site generator (SSG) to update the site, it will do so based on the Markdown content files currently available. Which now stop at the end of April. Meaning everything from May onward will be deleted from the web.
If I don’t touch anything, the website will be fine. I can’t update it, but it will be fine.
I could write something to parse the existing website from HTML back to Markdown files that can then be used as input for the SSG to convert back into updated HTML files…2
Or I could start over and build a whole new website on a different domain name. That was super easy and only took a few hours.