Those who tried to access this website for the last few days or so must have noticed that it was inaccessible, that at times it displays the error message “404 – File not found” and at other times, it displays “Error establishing database connection”.

A major server disruption has caused the problem. Every single file and database entries on my server was lost. It took a few days for the guys at the hosting company to recover the files and database entries. While the files recovered are pretty recent, unfortunately the database is not. Even worse, the hosting company failed to recover my WordPress database at all. Which is bad, because without the database my WordPress installation is as good as newly installed. That database contains all the posts I’ve ever written, all comments ever posted, in short, all the contents of my blog.

Fortunately for me, I had a backup created when I updated my WordPress installation to WordPress 2.7 some time ago. Nevertheless, it was dated November 27, 2008. Anything I wrote after that date was not recovered.

Fortunately still for me, I have a friend that can help: Google. Since my blog is rather popular with Google (PageRank: 2), Googlebot crawls (access) my blog quite often, and everytime it does it saves a copy of the page it views into its cache, so that it can use it to provide information when people do a search on Google. My blog was popular enough that all of the newer posts are in the Google cache. Only one comment was not.

So it took me another few days to recover everything back, and put things back in place. While doing so, I decided that the blog needs a new look too, a fresh start for a new year. You may experience intermittent connection problem while accessing the blog though, but at least now it is back online again, and this little place on the web will once again be a place where thoughts, opinions, knowledge and entertainment come to play.