So what happened?

The Squid Zone has, for a number of years, run in the Amazon cloud.  It is an instance in a pool of (presumably virtual) servers.  Without getting into the obscene technical details, this affords a nice web-based interface to control most aspects of the server, and I can log in with a terminal session to do the hands-on administration that needs to be done.

Because I had a lot of data, years of stuff, I used to make bi-weekly copies of the image, and keep the previous backup.  Each time I made an image, I’d restore it to check that it worked.

Finally in … March 2013 I think it was, I logged in to do the usual maintenance.  I made an image, shut down the server, and loaded the image.  It crapped out hard.  No problem, I have the known-working image from a couple weeks ago, thought I.

So I loaded that image, and it crapped out.

Unable to load either image, all was lost.  Poof!  7 years of blog gone into the ether.  That’s all it took.  At that point, I had to decide to continue fresh, or give it up, and I gave it up: I wanted the break.

Time has marched on, and I want to be back at it again.  Also, I have a different strategy for preserving my content now 🙂