(this post was originally posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007)

On Monday I was plugging away at my site. I usually put in two – three hours a day. Writing content, checking content, up loading it to my site. I had the structure laid out and was up to almost 20 pages.

I was about to add a sandbox site, for me to test out some design things. In the CPanel of my web host, that is basically the control panel where you can install and uninstall programs, check stats, do mail, and a host of various other things.

Anyway I looked and saw some extra programs. I started doing some hosting house cleaning, deleting this and that. When I was finished I went on to install that test site.

Then I went back to my original site. I got an error message. I did it again. Same message. I started to feel sick.

At first I thought maybe the hosting company’s server was down or something. But no, everything was fine. I went back and checked my files. I looked in the folder where my site should have been.

It was empty.

At first I just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t really delete my site. That was literally days of work. I said a little prayer, hoping against hope.

I checked and rechecked.

Gone.

I told my husband. He didn’t believe me.

“How did you delete your site? No you couldn’t have, it’s there just check again.”

I wanted him to be right. He usually is right. But not this time. It was gone.

“Ok,” he suggested, “ work offline and print off the pages that are saved in your history.”

Brilliant idea! One of the many reasons I am glad I am married to him. Tried it. Nope same horrible error message.

I was starting to go through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining. . . I called the hosting company to see if there was some way they had a copy of my files backed up. They did, for $75.

“How would you like to pay for that?” I told the tech I would have to get back with him.

Why did this happen? The thought/verse “All things work together for good. . .” kept going through my mind.

This can’t be good. I hadn’t backed up anything. I would have to redo everything. It seemed like time down the drain.

I finished my stages denial (depression, acceptance) I would just have to start again. Something good would come from this. I just needed to be open to see it. I prayed again. This time that God would help me and give me a good perspective.

I started working and realized that I remembered how everything was on the website template. What took me days to figure out took only about 30 minutes to restore. I plugged in my template and reset the setting and was ready to for content.

I use a Content Management System (CMS) to build my site. It makes it easier to upload content. But the trick is understanding how to set up the structure. You have to set sections and then categories, before you can add articles.

As I was doing this I realized that some of my sections were repetitive. I saw how I could consolidate things to make the information clearer. I also thought up new sections and categories that I hadn’t though of before. The new site would be better than the first!

I am now backing up my site every night! I am so glad I only had a relative few articles to loose! It would have been devastating if I had done this with dozens of articles and categories.

I am writing this three days later. Most of my content is up. I have learned a lot (check three times before you delete anything! And always, always, always, backup your stuff). As you can tell I have found many reasons to be happy about my – accident . Everything really did work out. What seemed to be a set back turned out to be a leap forward!

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