Back up your back ups!!!!!
So, about a year ago I started down this self hosting path and being the cheapskate i am I obviously went with the cheapest route available. FREE! Not that you cant accomplish that goal because it is totally acheivable. But I really didnt think it through. Just because its backed up doesnt mean its safe. You really should back up your back ups.
I was using Yunohost for the longest time on an old pc here at home. It's a really great solution but its not complete. You should have something set up for offsite and with redundacy. Especially if you do something crazy like start a podcast, LBRY channel and then start up a 3Speak channel. Things like these create a lot of files you want to save such as intros/outros, theme music, templates, thumbnails, shownotes, etc. Me being in podcasting/internet radio since 2006, you would think I would know better. And I do. But I let my gaurd down over the last year and started saving all my backups on my Yunohost server. But that computer died and I have no way to get into that hard drive to recover the files. But I'm good! I still have those files on my current laptop. I can just swap them onto the new laptop and boom all is good.
Ummm, nope
Photo by Jessica Lewis from Pexels
In my hurriedness over the last several weeks to get into trying Arch again and jumping headfirst into the AwesomeWM Only to give it a try I mad a HUGE mistake. My Frankenputer died at almost the same time I was moving to my "new" laptop. (Got the wife a new one and I took her old one). I ordered a 2.5 external hard drive enclosure specifically to move data to the "new" laptop from Frankenputer.
Now let me preface the following with a warning. Do not attempt to nuke and pave while consuming alcohol in any amount! I dont know how or when but somewhere that night I must've thought it was a great idea to swap the hard drives so I could just contiue with Frankenputers hard drive and could worry about using the "new" hard drive for the external hard drive. I then vaugely rememer that was the same night that I made the decision to switch to AwesomeWM on Arch and just "deal with it".
Flash forward to today
I get home for the first time this week. My new hard drive enclosure arrived a few days ago and I quickly plug it in to start some files transferring and ...
nothing.
Not a god damn thing is on it! Its a fresh install of Arcolinux (Arch).
I know what you are thinking. "Just throw the Yunohost hard drive in that enlosure and get your data!" Alas you are correct. I could do that but that hard drive is an old 500GB 3.5 ide that will not fit in the enclosure. The enclosure is a 2.5 sata. So now I wait until I can find another enclosure I can afford at some time in the future and just buckle down and get back to creating new content with new intros/outros. Maybe this is a good time to start Season 2 of The Self Hosted Podcast. Lol.
I'm not really all that worried about loosing out on most of that data. Because I can make more of it. But what I am pissed about is not being able to access nearly 50GB of indie music I've been sent from some of the worlds most talented people. I love listening to them way more than anything that is played on modern teresstrial radio. Indie music actually has passion in it. Not some over hyped heavily produced autotune music that comes out of the cookie cutter studios.
So remember folks. Even when you do back up your data. You must back up your back ups. And dont play with your data while you are drinking heavily.