It’s been a rather dramatic day for beards.org. The server on which the site is hosted suffered a disk failure that required restoring the site from a backup. Unfortunately, the latest backup available was from a few days ago. So the beards of the world gallery has temporarily lost three photos and the view counters have been set back a bit. A new comment for the blog was also lost. The gallery images will be restored soon and the commenter on the blog will be invited to re-submit.

While the loss of data is not something enjoyable, at least the data lost this time was relatively minor. Ironically, I was going to take a new backup earlier today, but the server outage had just hit. Had I made it in under the wire, the data loss essentially would have been nil. The lesson here for everyone is one that’s been repeated time and again: back up, back up, back up your data! You’ll be glad that you did.

Also, as a result of the server outage, the site was missing in action for most of the day. I’m happy that it’s back now. I hope that you are, too!