1105th Friday Blog Roundup

My site went down this week for about 12 hours. I noticed around noon, and I immediately closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I googled to see if other people’s sites were down. I looked at my account, and all seemed to be okay. I just couldn’t access the dashboard or site.

I decided to wait. It had to be server-related and not site-related. These things would work themselves out. But around 6 pm, I decided that I had to call customer support. They confirmed my site was offline, and they thought it might be malware-related. I closed my eyes again and took some deep breaths. This would definitely be above my head.

I had to wait an hour for the report, and it came back with one infected file. Could I just delete it? Googling brought me to a bulletin board where one post said I could definitely delete it without destroying my site, and another said deleting it would destroy my site.

I wrote an old web developer friend to ask if I could buy an hour of his time to clean up the site, and while I waited for him to write back, I downloaded the file and looked at the code. It looked fine. Not strange at all. I could just delete this… right? And if it ruined everything, I could upload it back into the site… right?

This is the problem with knowing a little but not knowing enough.

In the end, as I was moving to delete the file, my site came back online. And my friend wrote back that he would be happy to help for free. But now nothing needed to happen. We could just catch up.

So all’s well that ends well?

P.S. I was only mildly panicked because I happen to have made my backups a few hours before the site went down, and I keep the last few backups. Have you made a backup recently?

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Finding a Different Path sends herself a reminder that she always feels the same way (overwhelmed) at the same time of year (start of the school year), so she doesn’t need to be surprised. It means a lot of brief updates in a single post, but it was good to see her words in my feed reader.

Lastly, I love All & Sundry’s post about becoming a more interesting person by becoming a person at peace with her life. I love this so much: “I feel like a person who is not incomplete when I am by myself … I feel buoyed by the simple good times I have had lately and I feel like those are the things that are important in my life, rather than milestones and accomplishments.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Is it okay to push this button? Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 9 – 16) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.