Scotsmanality

Well, I had basically given up hope that I would ever retrieve the old Scotsmanality site.  The articles were gone, never to return.  I had exhausted all resources – of which there wasn’t many.  I had scoured my hard drive for an old backup, but the only 2 backups I had were corrupted(which can happen when handling large SQL files sadly), and the data section that holds all the wonderful articles from throughout the years simply wasn’t there, so there wasn’t even the possibility of saving them.

The people who host my server, Hostgator, had also checked their backups and no dice – every one they had resulted in the same issue I was having in that the gl_stories table only had 31 entries, when it was meant to have about 1450.  I’d contacted my old hosts PHPWebHosting, in the hopes they they somehow had a backup sitting around.  They said they would look but it wasn’t likely, because we were talking about a database file from over a year ago.

I’d even spent a good hour scouring the Web Archive, in the hopes of finding most of my articles.  No luck there unfortunately, and I’d be lucky to find even 50 of my old articles.  So over the last few days, I’ve pretty much came to terms with the fact that every article was gone – and that’s been hard to do.  I loved that site, and it was a big part of my life, and really it was very fucking upsetting to think that every one of those articles I spent so much time on – were gone.

Then PHPWebhosting e-mailed me.  My support ticket to them had the subject “I know the answer is going to be no” as that’s how “confident” I was about the whole deal.  Well they had went scouring their servers for backups, and 2 days after the fact, just as I had given up….

I think I found a back-up.

I think I found a back-up.

I think I found a back-up.

WHAT?  I received this message on my cellphone while I was at the dentists yesterday.  I was all fucked up on valium, and they had just frozen my mouth.  I was all relaxed, and then BOOM! I get that message.  Any chances of being relaxed were gone as I fidgeted in the chair, anxious to get the fuck home to see if, by god, they had actually managed to pull off a miracle.  The appointment went quicker than I expected and my wife was the other side of town, so I stumbled out in the snow, and in a drug-filled haze somehow made it home, rushing to the computer, everything cloudy around me, just to log on and check.

And they had.  They had miraculously found the backup, and restored it for me.  All Scotsmanality articles were back – that large portion of my life which I thought had gone – were returned.  All those precious memories – the racist jokes, the 7 Lives Exposed reviews, the Post Office feud, juicebytim – everything, returned safe and sound.  So fucking awesome.  What’s funny is to the support staff at PHPWebhosting it was just another job, and probably a tedious one at that.  They could have quite easily not bothered and said “Yep, can’t find one – next time be more careful” but they didn’t.  They worked, and they managed to provide me with results within my dreams – every fucking article returned.

I ended up writing them up like a 6 paragraph response, explaining what they had did, and how happy I was.  I also told them to take everyone out to lunch, spend about $1000 and bill me for it.  I mean seriously – that site was like my baby – for me, you can’t even put a price on all of that.

So yes – Scotsmanality is preserved again, I’ll have those Mystress articles up soon, and thank you very much PHPWebhosting.