It’s been thirteen years since I started ChristianWebsite.com. Over the years I’ve had server glitches and minor database problems here and there. I’ve even lost data from time to time. But never have I had such a catastrophic server crash as I experienced on June 8.

This site is hosted on a dedicated server with a raid configuration and dual hard drives. Everything written to the primary drive is automatically written to the secondary drive. Theoretically (key word), if the primary drive crashes, you simply switch the secondary drive and keep on going. If only it had worked that smoothly last week.

Around 8:30 last Sunday night I noticed that the server wasn’t responding. No big deal. This has happened plenty of times. I’ll just login to the sever control panel and reboot the server. The reboot failed! I sent a request for the server to be manually rebooted. A few hours later I was contacted by my host and told that the raid crashed and destroyed the data on BOTH hard drives.

Since I have been using the dual hard drives I made the mistake of not backing up locally as often as I had in the past. The most recent directory backup I had locally was from August 2007. I thank God that I at least had that. ALL blog entries on the new site were lost as well as a few other databases.

After 60+ hours of work I finally have ChristianWebsite 70% restored. Thank God for Google’s cache feature. The other 30% is permanently lost. I also lost several other smaller websites that were not backed up locally.

As bad as it was, it could have been worse. You know, I feel like there’s a lesson hidden in this somewhere…. hmmm….

ALWAYS MAKE BACKUPS!!!! I learned my lesson the hard way.