I said the very same thing! That's insane not to have backups! But you have to remember on behalf of the hosting company, they probably did make regular backups. But most IT departments cycle through backups tapes on a pretty regular basis and re-record over them. Daily backups usually only go back a couple of weeks. I've seen major corporations that only had 7 sets of backups. One for each day of the week. And every Monday night they would erase last Monday's backup and write over it with this weeks backup. After that, you fall back on disaster recovery copies that may be a month or more out-of-date, and stored off-site. Remember, Ugobe wasn't paying their bills, so it was probably more the case of by the time Ugobe got caught up on their hosting bill, the site had been taken down for a while, and the old backups had already been written over by newer backups that didn't include Ugobe's site. And the cost of retrieving the archived copies was probably more than Ugobe wanted (or could afford ) to pay. And I doubt anyone at Ugobe made backup copies of their website. That's why they hired a hosting company. They didn't have the staff or time to worry about web site hosting. They even outsourced the forum admins and PleoWorld hosts. Yes, our beloved PleoWorld hosts like Cami were not Ugobe employees.
The same is pretty much true for these forums. If the hard drive crashes, the hosting company have a nightly backup that could be restored an we could be back online in hours or the next day. But if I need something restored from last month, I'm up a creek. I could probably pay hundreds of dollars to have them pull old tapes and search for an old copy of my site, but it's not practical for anything short of a real emergency. And I guarantee they have nothing from more than a month or two old. So, if I fell 60 or 90 days behind on my payments, I'm sure they would shut my site down. And if it took me another 30 or 60 days to pay up, I doubt if they would bother to keep backups for me either. They would have gotten overwritten as part of the normal process of backing up their paying customers.
Now, I do occasionally make a backup of the database and copy it down to my local PC, but if I had to go set up on a new hosting company, I'm sure we would loose a month or more worth of posts, and I'm sure I would have to re-create a number of things. Our hosting company has already moved this site from one machine to a newer one a couple of months ago, without us even noticing. So, I'm sure they could restore us if need be . . . assuming I keep paying the bills.
But I know Ugobe had copies of their "site". Because they handed out copies to their distributors. And they were able to bring the main body of their site back up pretty complete and intact. The static pages are easy to backup and save copies of. And whoever designed their web site for them probably had copies laying around. The forums and the plogs on the other hand, are stored separately in separate databases, and probably even on different physical machines. The plogs appear to be part of the community pages on the main site, while the forums were a completely separate subdomain name. So, it makes sense for that "part" to be lost, and the plogs saved.
But, then again, I was completely wrong on who bought the pleo IP . . . so who knows.
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Topic: Ugobe is dead (Read 26780 times)