Friday, December 19, 2014

Just A Quick Note

Something strange is going on with my Goggle account, which also controls all my blogs. For a while tonight everything disappeared and I was locked out. If for any reason PBW does vanish again, rest assured I have most all of the blog backed up and will do my best to get it back online. As always your patience and understanding is greatly appreciated.

Added: On further investigation it seems Google detected some sort of unusual activity on my account, assumed it was a hijack in progress, and disabled everything until I could verify my identity with them and reset the account. Fortunately I was online when it happened and was able to deal with everything immediately. I've since backed up what I didn't already have saved from the blog and added a few additional security measures to protect my content.

I don't think I can describe how upsetting it is to see the last decade of your online writing life vanish as if it never existed. I do have every year saved, but as I was thinking of how much work it would be to recreate the blog I admit, I felt quite discouraged. I might start a mirror blog in private somewhere and start copying the content there in case this happens again. In the meantime, if you have a blog but have not backed up your content, you might want to make an effort, just in case.

4 comments:

  1. I'm not exactly sure how to back up my blog...but losing everything is sure an incentive to figure it out...!!!

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  2. So glad you got it all back. That is not a fun feeling to experience.

    About 18 months ago, Google flagged my blog as spam and deleted the entire blog. I panicked. SPAM? I was publishing original content 5-7 days per week, and it their algorithms determined it was spam. At the time this represented 3.5 years of blogging, and it was a huge blow. Luckily, like you, Google gave me a limited time to verify I was a human and running a legit blog, but I know others that never got that chance. I did get back all of my blog and eventually migrated over to a self-hosted WP blog. BUT, with that said, I back up my entire blog and its databases weekly. Even more frequently if I make big changes or add a lot of new content at once. I strongly encourage everyone who has a blog to back it up at least weekly.

    Terlee: It depends on what blog platform you use, but if you Google "how to back a [Google/WP, etc.] blog," you should be able to find the information.

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  3. Eek! I didn't know this could happen. Or how to back up a blog. Thanks to Jen for the tip.

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  4. I lost a years old blog to a stupid mistake of mine... I had a backup and when my blog got goofy, I don't know, a database was corrupted, something. I never was sure what it was, but I don't think it was malicious. Instead of putting the back up on top of the bad one... you see where this is going don't you? I moved the corrupted copy/database(s) onto my good one... my only back-up... so yeah. That's when I realized back-ups need to exist in two places at once because I'm able to wreck one completely by accident and then I have nothing... that was a blow. I totally understand where you're coming from and am glad you got things back under control.

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