[jacquesm]

I can relate to all of these because I've lived through all of these, fortunately not as much in the public eye as Justin and his team (the web was much smaller back then) but this brought back a whole bunch of memories.

Thanks Justin (assuming you read HN) for writing these up.

[stevesearer]

Somewhere around 5 years ago I was doing some maintenance on my site's database without really knowing what I was doing.

My wedding website was hosted on the same server, so I thought I might as well delete it since the wedding was months before. Dropped that database. Visited my business website a few minutes later and it wasn't working. Apparently both sites were in the same database...

Called MediaTemple support and asked if they had a backup. They did! Support guy asked if I wanted him to restore it. Of course I do. He goes on hold.

He comes back on and says, "Sir, I'm sorry to say that the last back up actually backed up the blank version of the site so we don't have anything to restore. Is there anything else I can help you with?"...

After hanging up, I explained the situation to my wife and she just says, call back and ask someone else. The next support guy tells me that there actually is a way to restore an old archived backup, but there will likely be a loss of data and there will be a fee. Turns out the fee was only $15 and the backup was from the previous day, so no loss of data.

I'm still running the same site and I might soon be able to hire my first employee :)

My takeaways were to create backups, not monkey around on the database, and to call support back and ask for someone else to verify what the other person told me.

[justin]

Thanks for reading!

[jacquesm]

Hah :) Cool. I'm sure there are lots of people that can relate to your stories in one way or another but what with us being active in the exact same market (but you did way better on the execution and on the business part) it really hit the spot here.