Recovering From Blog Loss in Two Easy Steps

silverton-pano-pre-dawn-winter-md

  1. Accept.
  2. Create.

I let life get in the way of taking care of administrative tasks like renewing my domain host, and consequently lost 2 years’ worth of data. 240 blog posts in total, and their photos. Stuff about ultrarunning, philosophy, writing, and food. The things I love.

Now why would I lose those in this age of file storage and such? Surely I made backups. Well yes, I did. I’m not that out of touch. Thing is, I backed them up to the hosts’ servers. When my account was deleted, no more files. I only have an xml download of the posts’ metadata. No images, no content. Just tags and categories and titles. Even archive.org hadn’t trolled the site due to my robots.txt setting. Wow.

Having the titles is sadder than losing everything, because I can now see what was lost. I can remember the posts and think, yeah that was a good one. I didn’t write often so when I did write it was usually long and thought out.

So what’s the answer to all of this? Nothing, really. I’m already a fairly good Stoic so this is not difficult to accept, or at least to know that I will accept it quite soon. I’ve lost data before. It’s data. It’s 1s and 0s and words that ultimately was a personal blog read by almost no one.

That’s OK.

I’m the same person with the same capacity to create. And I will.