It looks like we're back. Fingers firmly crossed.

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[still from Clerks, posted by jeremyv]

The short version?

domesticat.net's been parked on omnipotent.net, a machine under Gareth's control, for years. Jeff's been wanting his own space to play, and we liked the idea of parking our sites on the same box. We were in the process of slowly moving domesticat over when a couple of database errors during our vacation caused me to move up the timeframe.

When we got back from [ Washington / Arkansas / Mississippi / if it's Tuesday we're where, exactly? ] I decided to get started on the process. We migrated my mail to gmail ... years and years of inane little emails, all now offered up on the altar of the Goog ... and tarballed all the files on the server.

Good thing, because -- to steal a phrase we use often in the IT dept -- the current incarnation of omnipotent shat itself a couple of hours later.

We had a nightly backup of the database, though we couldn't get to it during work hours. We had everything else because of the steps we'd taken the night before, and it was just a matter of restoring it all.

If you're seeing this, then it all actually worked, and cat.net is one less site Gareth has to worry about restoring.

Hooray for backups.

I say again, hooray for backups.

Note to self: next time, look into archiving multiple days of backup of at least the entries here. That's eight years of my life in those database entries, and the thought of losing them, and needing to recreate them by hand, made me shudder visibly at work today.

Gareth was readying the successor to omnipotent's current machine; it was to be ready by this weekend. He's got day, week, and month backups. He's likely to be okay. Gareth's the careful sort, and that attitude pays off when your machinery needs a nappie.

In the meantime ... we're back, and if no one minds, I'm going to sign off and beat the cat. (Trust me, he deserves it.)