Author Journey (September 13, 2021)

So, I’ve had an interesting couple of weeks, but before I tell you about it, back up everything you’ve ever done to as many locations as you can possibly imagine. Save the images, the text, the formatting. Save everything!

September 13, 2021

#Blogging

You may or may not have noticed, but I haven’t posted anything since August 26. If you had come looking to see what was going on, you may have found yourself staring at a screen telling you that the site you were looking for does not exist! And at that moment, it did not. That’s right it had completely vanished. I woke up on Saturday morning on August 28 and saw a notification that my site was down. After driving for two days to get home, this was how I was greeted!

So what? Sites go down all the time. However, not like this. I figured that something had gone wrong with a plugin so tried to log on and check things out. I couldn’t get it. So, I went to my hosting service and attempted to enter through the cPanel and I couldn’t get into there. Eventually, I managed to find a post on their blog that revealed a major catastrophe had occurred and it was looking like all of the servers and their backups had been critically damaged.

But I should have backups, shouldn’t I? Well, that’s part of my service and I can only access the backups through the cPanel, which was offline. As the day unfolded, it became clearer and clearer that something serious had happened. I was looking at the loss of almost two thousand posts across two sites.

For a while, I didn’t quite know what to think. They were telling us that all of the sites had been erased and that it would be almost impossible to recover them. It wasn’t until Monday that this truly sank in. That was several hundred thousand words over the space of three years (and longer with some of the older posts that I brought over from my old site). All gone!

Honestly, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or declare war with the gods. After all the stages of grief in the space of a morning, I decided that I would rebuild. If nothing else, I could try to recover all the words. So, I took to Google cache and tracked down almost all of my old posts, grabbing the text and putting it into a lot of different word documents. That was fine for everything that had already been posted, but as you may know from previous posts, I scheduled a lot. My plan has me working on posts several months in the future. Where were they?

Amazingly, they were all sat in the WordPress app on my phone. I had checked them the night before and when the site disappeared, it could no longer update, so they just sat there. It was not an easy feat copying them from there and emailing them to myself, but I did it. In all, I spent an entire week copying, pasting, proving to Google that I wasn’t a bot, and doing all the same on my phone for the future posts. Amazingly, I recovered everything but for three posts which were all scheduled for around the time the site vanished.

It was a lot of work, but I did it. Then, I saw the latest update from the web hosting service. They had been able to recover one of the servers and were going to try to do something similar to the other ten. However, my server was always flagged as one of the worst-hit and would be one of the last ones they attempt to save. All I could do was wait.

After almost a week of watching the updates and translating the French comments into English to see just how angry or happy the majority of their clients were (it’s based in Montreal), they announced that my server had been recovered, although there may be some corruption. I was able to log in. My backups were there so I started the process of recovering my sites.

Now, I have two sites. This one and Ecchi Hunter. What were the chances that both would be recoverable? Turns out it was fifty percent. Otaku Author reappeared and so far I’ve only found one image that was corrupted. Ecchi Hunter was not so lucky. It had suffered severe corruption. I couldn’t even log in to the back end.

So, that site is still down and we’re looking at a complete rebuild. It’s frustrating as hell, but we’re going to take the chance to take it to the next level. We know that there is a desire for reviews of ecchi anime. We were on target for more than one million views for 2021 after nine-hundred thousand in 2020. Almost half of our traffic came to us directly, the rest through search engines and social media.

I imagine it will be offline for the rest of the year so that we can get everything together for a proper launch in the New Year. Of course, I do have all the old reviews thanks to Google cache and we still have the images. Anyhow, there’s lots to do there.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. It hasn’t been fun, but I think things will be fine now. If you do see anything odd on this site like missing images, please let me know so that I can fix them! Anyhow, normal service shall resume henceforth. Thanks for reading, stay safe, and back up your work!

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