You may have seen it on the interweb news already (Techcrunch, Slashdot, The Register etc) so I'm late to the party, mainly due to the fact I've been hard at work restoring our lost servers. I say lost. I mean nicked.
Stolen.
So a note to all you admins out there in charge of sites. Have a think about what your strategy is in case on not just hardware failure, but total loss. Not something you think about too often.
We are mainly back after 4 days of frantic work, but have made some harsh decisions about the very old sites based on some archaic tech that we have just cut free and plan to remake. The only main one missing as of now is Real World Records which we are planning to get online in a new form this week.
Alongside the restore we moved hosts, and switched to a hosted system rather than a co-located server so had to get elbow deep to reconfigure most of the sites to get them working on the new server so this wasn't just a simple backup restore.
The only missing thing are the video assets. We will be re-encoding and re-uploading those over time to take advantage of the new flash based video player we switched to earlier this year.
As ever having Peter's name attached gives it legs in the blog world and here is some of the reporting.
Techcrunch | Wall Street Journal | Slashdot | The Register
Always interesting to read the comments (apart from the endless Sledgehammer jokes) and see what people on the outside think our setup is like. Most appear to assume a large enterprise type setup with a team of devs, designers and editors. The reality is much more modest.