For some reason, the company that has provided service for this blog since May 2, 2010, stopped working on July 10, 2013, at 11 a.m., EDT. I went to the web guy’s website and found it (and his wife’s site) was also down. I have had pretty good luck with the company to date; I never was offline more than 10 minutes in the past.
What’s bugging me, though, is not just that the site was offline for over six hours, but the fact that I had not set up a current backup system. Oh, the first five years of this blog are available at my old Blogger blog site. And I DID create an echo site, rogerowengreen.wordpress.com four years ago; I just never actually followed up on this.
The service being down has prompted me to finally post there as a backup site going forward, and, as time permits, back four years to May 2, 2010.
This actually also addresses another issue I’ve thought about, which I may have mentioned here: what happens to the blog when I die? Assuming – a big assumption – that WordPress will continue to provide a free blog service AND that they don’t start deleting blogs that have become defunct, then the backup site will be my blog beyond the grave. Or something like that.
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Sad that Cory Monteith, 31, of the TV show Glee died from an overdose of heroin and alcohol. His character Finn Hudson will have to die as well, but will it be in some noble fashion, when the show starts shooting later this month? Or will they let Finn’s death be an object lesson to the fans?
Cory Monteith’s death is awful. I hate seeing young lives lost this way, and despite my trending-negative impression of GLEE (I can’t stand the show, actually), the level of talent involved in the production is really pretty special.
How will they handle his death? I wonder that myself…I’m not sure what the best way to go is. GLEE doesn’t really do subtle all that well, and this is tough no matter what. They can’t just do a one-episode “He’s dead!” and then not much mention it again, but they probably don’t want it to cast a pall over the entire season…but it likely will. I have a feeling that the season will be like that year of “8 Simple Rules” that had to go on without John Ritter. That show never had a prayer of recovering, but GLEE might make it because of its more ensemble nature. This is going to be a big creative challenge, though, and I don’t think very highly of that show’s creative team. We’ll see.
I’d always assumed that your site was independently hosted rather than through wordpress.com. In any event, try the WordPress Database Backup plugin which will automatically backup your database in case of disaster.
Unless you print out the blog, or someone decides it’s of historical importance and prints it out for you, then it dies with you after you stop paying the bills to the IP. If your blog is in The Cloud, the blog dies when that part of The Cloud dies.
If you back up your blog on the latest computational device, then the blog dies when that device is outmoded. Lately The Wife has been making money by recovering documents from obsolete 20 year old machines. It’s tricky and not too many people know how to do it. She expects to get a lot more jobs like that as time goes on.
Yeah, all this work we do blogging, it’s not exactly a bid for immortality.
well, SP, the backup, which I figured out how to do from Blogger to WP, but not WP to WP, seems to be in process of working – I’ll know within 24 hours whether it actually takes! thanks for the suggestion!
I wasn’t seeking immortality, but I was hoping the Daughter could read it. I used to get a week’s worth on PDF e-mailed to me, but it got discontinued.
I was just thinking about this topic! I’d like Peanut to be able to be able to read about herself in the future and know I won’t be able to keep up the self-hosting package forever.
Lisa – pls tell me what you decide!
Hm. If after a few months no one comes up with a solution, it sounds like an easy enough program to write.
Gmail has been unavailable on several occasions. On February 24, 2009, the Gmail service was offline for 2 hours and 30 minutes, preventing millions of users from accessing their accounts. People who rely entirely on Gmail for business purposes complained about these outages.
I have a backup site at wordpress.com; however, there’s no way on God’s green earth I can move 13,000 posts in WP’s format plus about 8,000 static pages and more than 3,000 graphics, unless I retire next week and live into my 90s.
What I need to do, I think, is to talk some more people into signing up with my particular host using my referral link; already there are enough kickbacks to pay just under half my annual hosting bill.