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Disaster Recovery Update

You may have noticed that we’ve been offline for over a week now. This message is meant to explain what happened and what I’ve been doing to address the problem.

On June 1, the server on which my sites were hosted suffered hard drive failure and the filesystem became corrupted before the server could be pulled offline. Recovery is still in progress on the drive and it’s possible that I’ll be able to recover part or all of the server data, though that seems unlikely at this point.

It was at this point that I discovered that my off-site server backups were also corrupted and mostly unusable. Since then I have been recovering data from various other sources, such as very old offline backups, Google cache and even the Internet Archive. I have completed this process and have evaluated the recovered data.

While I was able to recover most of the old posts, I made the decision not to restore them. Nearly all of them contained outdated and useless information. I did restore most of the pages with the documentation, though, rearranging the information somewhat and making a few minor updates. Shortly I’ll be writing all new documentation for Bad Behavior anyway.

About a week ago I obtained a new server and have been configuring it to prepare it to host my sites going forward. The first thing installed was a versioned off-site backup system, from which it’s possible to roll back to different versions of each file (in case a corrupt file gets backed up, you can go back to the previous good copy). This will hopefully help prevent this situation from occurring in the future. (For the technically minded among you, I’m now using rdiff-backup, which is working well.)

The server is now fully configured and doing proper backups, and is now hosting the recovered web site.

I had to put virtually everything else on hold to complete this recovery, which affects several other sites than Bad Behavior and has absolutely destroyed my schedule and dramatically reduced my ability to make income, until the recovery is complete (and I still have a few other smaller sites to recover). If you’d like to support Bad Behavior during this critical time, please click here.

While we’re on the topic, if you have anything even remotely important on a computer, please do yourself a favor and ensure that you’re making backups – and that you can successfully restore from the backup! Eventually something like this will happen to you, and you will be glad you have the backups.

Finally, let me take a moment to thank you all for using Bad Behavior and for your support over the years. I actually have a new release ready, which blocks a couple of new spambots, and it will be posted in the next day or so. Again, if you’d like to support Bad Behavior during this time, please click here.

 
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11 Comments  comments 

11 Responses

  1. frank morrell

    Thank you for allowing me to donate to you. I am sorry it is not more. I am retired and not good money wise. 2 months ago I donated $25 to wordpress and the very next day made my first sales in 9 months I made $1.32. Felt so good. Since then I have had sales of a little over $30. That donation broke the ice. I am now starting to make sales and turning things around.I believe if you do not give you do not receive. I know because you allowed me to donate to you, it wil come back to me multiplied. Because I finally woke up, Things are changing for me to the good.
    It all started with my first donation which was $25 to wordpress. 9 months and nothing. Made the donation and I started making sales. I have quite a few web sites, they just are not selling anything but that is starting to change. You have no idea how good it feels to see I am making some sales. I was really getting discouraged but giving turned things around.
    Thank you very much for the opportunity to help both of us
    frank

  2. Thank you Michael for all your work on Bad Behavior!

    I use the plugin on almost all the sites I’ve developed and regularly donate MX entries to projecthoneypot.

    Very sorry to hear about the data loss.

  3. [...] looks like I’m not the only one to have a blog backup oops and lose data in the process. It’s nice to see a nod to implementing a robust backup strategy [...]

  4. dwarfplanet9

    Last year, we had a similar sounding failure. The hard drive, or its controller, literally smoked. We spent big bucks on a service that claimed to be able to do recovery from even badly damaged media. O our surprise, all of our critical data was recovered! We won’t be letting that happen again for sure; we now have a redundant backup/recovery setup.

    Thanks so much for your work on Bad Behavior. We are a cash poor nonprofit, but if we can help in some way, please let me know. I’m now looking for some money to send your way :-)

    Hang in there!

  5. Matt

    Bad Behavior seems to have started blocking Googlebot. This is 100% googlebot yet its being blocked.

    2012-06-28 15:51:23

    User-Agent claimed to be Googlebot, claim appears to be false. GET / HTTP/1.1
    Accept: */*
    Accept-Encoding: gzip
    Cf-Connecting-Ip: 66.249.67.171
    Cf-Ipcountry: US
    Cf-Visitor: {“scheme”:”http”}
    Connection: Keep-Alive
    From: googlebot(at)googlebot.com
    Host: http://www.wowmedia.eu
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
    X-Forwarded-For: 66.249.67.171
    X-Forwarded-Proto: http

  6. Thanks Michael for everything you do in Bad Behaviour. It’s now part of my regular armour. Sorry to hear about your server probs. – hope you get it all sorted out. I will donate no question!

    Ian

  7. liz

    Hi Micheal- I recently discovered Bad Behavior after noticing that I have the Pharma Hack on my website- and still do. When I google my site several links come up below for Viagra and other Pharma junk. However, on the front page of my site now, and on all pages of my site, on the bottom comes up Bad Behaviour has blocked XXX number of bots ect ect So I have to trust it I guess that it is doing the work which is why I donated. I wish I could place the Bad Behavior tag on one specific page of my site, and I wish I knew how to or where to go to clean the Pharma Hack from my Google analytics.

  8. [...] kind words, offers of technical assistance and of course donations during this very stressful disaster recovery. If you haven’t contributed lately, or at all, please help me keep Bad Behavior going by [...]

  9. [...] kind words, offers of technical assistance and of course donations during this very stressful disaster recovery. If you haven’t contributed lately, or at all, please help me keep Bad Behavior going by [...]