In future, I think we are most certainly planning to take personal backups in addition to those provided by our hosting company.

Although, I don't think some people here appreciate how difficult that actually is. It's all very well suggesting incremental backups, but we still need to get that 20GB copied in the first place. I personally have a 20GB usage limit on my home broadband account, so I can't do it (compression will bring that down, but I still can't afford to lose such a huge chunk of my allowance). It will take many hours to complete.

Then ... to perform the actual incrementals, we'll need some pretty clever software. It'll need to support byte-level diffs, database-driven compares (we can't run a full 20GB compare over the net), shadow copy (the site is live 24/7, and you can't backup a live file) etc. That kind of software is hard to find at a price we can afford.

Then we need someone who has the time and patience to track down such a piece of software, configure it up, provide some of their own bandwidth and disk space to host the backup, do the initial 20GB, and not get bored of the game in 3 or 4 months only to disappear with our backup, leaving us to start all over again.

I think most people here, at least those with their own brain, can understand that relying on our hosts to perform the server backup is pretty normal behaviour, especially given the difficulties I've just described, and that having our hosts go belly-up without warning, and without any last-minute access to the server to make our own backup, is NOT normal.

These "tut tut, should of had a backup" people really piss me off. It's so easy to sit there and make accusations, but I really doubt any of them have got an off site backup themselves. Maybe we'll accidently lose their accounts in the transfer process.

To the remaining 99% of nice people here, we very much appreciate your support and rest-assured we are working to restore the site as soon as we can. As MrA has said, we are still optimistic that we'll get some limited access to our old server (although probably not until later this week), and in the meantime we are considering the possibilities for starting a new server

-MrD

These [...] people really piss me off. [...]Maybe we'll accidently lose their accounts in the transfer process.

Update, Saturday 6th October 2007 ...

Good news! We have access to our old server again. While it's still too early to promise anything, the data does appear to be complete and Buzz is in the process of copying it just now. With a bit of luck we should be online this weekend, perhaps even later this evening.

-MrD

...Updated Update! It won't be this evening unfortunately, but we're well on course to being online sometime Sunday afternoon.