How do you recover when your hosting provider loses everything?
You've probably seen the messages at the stackoverflow blog and on codinghorror:
blog.stackoverflow.com experienced 100% data loss at our hosting provider, CrystalTech.
We're working to restore it from backups ASAP!
Some of the stuff Jeff's doing is on Twitter. What would you be doing in a similar situation?
Firstly, make your own damn offsite backups. And test them. There are dirt cheap services that handle this. Or if you insist your expert hosting company should do this for you, make them restore an image from backup monthly just to keep them on their toes. But seriously, even just adding your own RSS feeds and setting the client to cache forever is a good first step.
Secondly, the Wayback Machine and Google cache can help. So can your own browser cache, so make copies of that before you thrash it. I hope you haven't been following the "clear your cache" step helpdesk likes to give.
Worst case (which they're probably doing now): reconstruct everything from sources as:
- Google Cache
- Wayback Machine
- ...
I would double up on my efforts to design and build a time machine. Once that project was complete I would go back to late last week and smack myself around the head until I:
- had a backup plan that involved more than one host (i.e. backing up to one or more machines held by one or more other providers
- had a backup testing plan, so the backups could be verified often enough
- had an offline backup arrangement of my own as well as any provided by the main hosting provider, i.e. backing up to a local machine and making tape/CD/DVD backups of that data regularly and storing them in a safe place.
- had implemented tested and retested all the above plans
In the absense of success in the TimeMachine project, all I would be able to do was wait patiently for the host to do what they could and hope that their backup arrangements were sufficient such that the data (or at least a recent copy there-of) can be restored in a short amount of time. I would then make sure that the above mentioned plans were made, implemented and regularly tested.
There isn't much to do. Find a new host, restore from backups.
If the host really wants to play ball and be nice they'd immediately freeze any usage of the disks in question and get them to a data recovery specialist... but in reality thats never gonna happen.