ATTENTION

10/01/2006

Just a little update...I haven't had as much time recently to work on the site due to work and life but will say I should have at least something up before too much longer here. The new server has been in place for some time I just haven't done any work on a new homepage is all :P

02/01/2006

Ok, I've been sent a list of recoverable files and out of 9 GB worth of data they can recovery approximately 160 MB of it. Basically everything is toast. I have no choice but to start over now. For the time being everything that is currently up is going to remain where it is on my "test" server. I will be rebuilding everything on the new server I bought recently that was intended to replace the old one. I was hoping for a more graceful transition but it appears that isn't going to happen now. Once that is up and running I will transition everything over to it and that will be that.

This will be the last update until the new server is in place. At which time this message will be replaced with my site once again.

01/26/2006 (11:13)

Well it appears that it is in fact a mechanical failure, an issue with one of the heads. They'll now need to disassemble the drive inside of a clean room to remove the platters and extract the data the hard way. I've been told that I will very likely be able to get everything back except for files that were being written to when the head crashed. They will send me a list of recoverable files in 2 days. However, depending on the method they need to use in order to retrieve the data will effect the costs considerably. I was told I will likely be looking at $1800-$2200. After I get the file list and cost, if I decide to continue with the data recovery, it will take an additional 3-5 business days to retrieve the data, burn it to disks and get it to me. This is not to mention the time to get everything loaded back into the server. I really don't see that part taking very long if I do in fact get everything back... Anyhow, that's all I have for now. More to come in a few days.

Oh, almost forgot. Did I mention donations are welcome? :)

01/24/2006 (00:18)

The mail server is back up in a limited capacity. If you were using the webmail interface you will be missing roughly 10 months worth of mail. (sucks, I know...) If for some reason you cannot log in please contact me and I will get your account back up and running. If you don't know how to contact me then I'm pretty sure you don't have an account on my server.

01/23/2006

As you may have noticed the mail server is down.

Also, if I'm hosting your web site, it is very likely down as well.

My server has suffered a catastrophic hard disk failure.

I have already sent the hard disk to a Data Recovery Service and depending on the cost of data recovery I MAY NOT BE ABLE TO AFFORD GETTING ANY OF THE DATA BACK! If you don't know about the cost of data recovery let me enlighten you. $100 just to look at 1 hard drive to figure out what's wrong...$75+ an hour to recover it (I'm paying $120 an hour). MINIMUM cost is around $600 going all the way up to $5000+. If in the end it turns out I can't afford to have the data recovered I will post another update explaining the circumstances as well as the recovery costs I get quoted. I should hear from them in 1 to 2 days. If it ends up being too expensive for me and any of you are willing to help out please let me know. Otherwise I'm simply starting over from scratch.

As most of you know I have been hosting all of your web sites at my own expense for several years now and have not asked for any type of compensation in return. Don't think for a second that this doesn't mean I'm not trying to get all of it back. It's all or nothing with this type of service and my life for the past 6 years was on that disk.

Although I have always had a backup system in place I never actually tested it. As you may have guessed it wasn't actually making viable working backups.

I apologize to everyone for what has happened and be assured that measures will be in place in the future to prevent this type of thing from ever occurring again.

Thank you all and check back soon...