Disaster averted – thank you twitter and lunarpages

This morning, at 11:33, my wordpress dashboard went from this:

To this:

And I went from having a normal day to the ledge of a cliff in 2 seconds flat. I screamed. I freaked out.  And I tweeted. Luckily, I have some amazing twitter followers and tech friends, and @thevixy, @ikepigott, @jonmrich & @lorennason …you are my twitter heroes. You 4 kept me *relatively* sane when the world came crashing down…and my entire blog went kaput. You told me to breathe, found me articles on what might have happened, reminded me that you read my blog, and have many posts in your RSS readers and suggested solutions, including calling my hosting company and asking them if they could restore my database. Which is where Lunarpages came in – and was incredible. They were able to restore my database and recover every post (even my drafts!) and all my pages.

This near catastrophe taught me three things:

1. Twitter is awesome, especially when you make the effort to make real friends out of your followers. When you need them, they will be there. And, they will help you calm down, figure out the right solutions and talk you off the edge of insanity. Anyone who says social media and virtual relationships are silly just isn’t doing it right.
2. Backup your blog more often!! Luckily, even if Lunarpages hadn’t been able to save my database, I do backup my blog. But, I only back it up once a week…which meant I would have lost 5 posts that had been published plus the 15 I have scheduled for this month when I am on vacation (yikes!). So I need to backup more often – especially during times that I put a lot of new content onto my site.
3. My blog really means a lot to me! I have always enjoyed my blog – it is fun to write and I share great advice that some people read. But, I hadn’t ever thought about how much it meant to me until it was completely gone. The pages didn’t worry me as much – as I knew what was in them and could have re-written them. It would have taken time, but not that big of an issue. However, the thought of losing 2 years worth of thoughts, emotions, ideas and creativity nearly sent me into shock and made me realize how much I appreciate this blog!

So again, thank you to my amazing supporters and for talking me through this – I couldn’t have managed without you!

Related posts:

1. I’d like to my triple twitter traffic, Julien, but I’m not sure I got the answer as to how…
2. What has twitter taught you?
3. “We” are twitter.