Information Loss

Last night after I got home from work I sat up working from 7pm until about midnight. Five extra hours of work. Writing up stuff on an internal wiki to circulate to folk this morning for their review comments.

Imagine my surprise to get into work this morning and discover that it was all gone. A night’s work - not far off a working day’s worth - vanished. Turned out that all of yesterday’s changes had vanished. Not just mine, but about forty or fifty people’s work had been lost to the great server in the sky.

It’s a really sick feeling to know that you’ve lost stuff that is so hard to replace. (Probably nothing compared to losing your laptop.) Compounded by the fact that I’d missed watching the last two episodes of Lost on Channel 4 last night because I’d sat hammering out words on this keyboard, and drawing up diagrams to go with the text.

It was a stern and rant-ridden email that I fired off to the wiki administrator - who unfortunately is based in the US and didn’t respond until this afternoon. A long time to sit angry and frustrated.

Only now can I sit back amused that I’d ranted on the blog this week about information overload, only to have my own information trashed!

All's well that ends well? There’s a backup of all the material on the wiki from midnight that contains all the lost material. We’ve restored it to a second instance of the wiki, and can now cut and paste the missing content across. It’s very manual - since people have already made changes on the one-day-missing version, but at least it beats having to rethink five hours of work.

Moral of story - back up your work, in case no one else does it for you.