Last week I discovered something unbelievably sucky: I went to post a new blog, and I discovered that my blog had disappeared. I checked my host account and not only were all the files gone, but the database had been emptied as well. I immediately contacted my hosting company, but unfortunately this problem had occurred more than a month prior, so they had no backup to offer me (that’ll teach me to visit my own site more often!). I was devastated. Six years of posts, gone. I tried various internet archives, but no luck.

I was so depressed I considered just forgetting the whole site. I have another blog I use for my writing career, maybe I should just use that one. But no, it wasn’t enough! I might not post to this site very often anymore, but when I do it’s usually for cathartic purposes; I use this site to rant, complain, express joy, share news about my personal life… I didn’t want to lose it! But the idea of starting over from scratch just depressed me. So I left it.

Just this morning, I logged into a tool called Networked Blogs, which I use for disseminating posts from my various websites via Facebook and Twitter, to remove this site from my dashboard. I almost did a double-take when I realised that I could see some of my old posts. But I feared that these cached posts would be in the same situation as the archives: only the first few lines of each post and nothing more. But no, when I clicked, there were the last two years of posts in their entirety, images and all! Never has anyone copied and pasted so fast! Within minutes I’d copied all the text and saved it to my hard drive with cloud backup.

So today I’ve resurrected the last two years of posts. I do still have an old backup with the older ones, but the ones that matter to me today are here and that’s enough for me. And all those who were devastated to lose my zucchini slice and rogan josh recipes, those little gems are here too. Thank you, Networked Blogs. You saved my site.