We’ve caught a bad case of man flu here at nik.co.uk. Not the site author (touch wood), but the site itself. Somehow, at some point over the weekend, about a year and a half’s worth of photos disappeared from the archives. So did the templates and most of the plug-ins that help it do whizzy things behind the scenes, like link back to older entries on the basis of their relationship to the current date.

What happened? I don’t know. All was running smooth and clean on Saturday morning and, two days later, after walks in the woods, geocaching in the mud, winning at backgammon and draughts, losing at Scrabble and perudo, eating plenty and fooling my metabolism into thinking Christmas had come around again, I got to work this morning to log on and… nothing. Zip. Nada. A proxy error in the browser, and 20MB of files missing from the FTP window.

My host, which has always been very good in the past, is stumped. The tech supporties are escalating it upwards to their systems engineers because they ‘can see no reason why that would have happened’. But, but, but they say it could be 48 hours before they come back with an answer and that I should only get in touch again after that time, not before.

That’s less than entirely impressive, and I’m backing up in preparation to switch lock, stock and wholesale barrel to the host that I use for the rest of my sites. I’d considered that in the past, but never moved on it, too afraid that I’d lose some data on the way. Now, though, when the data seems to have been digitally destroyed with no effort on my own part, there seems little reason not to move to a cheaper, better-organised set of servers on which you can pick your own password.

So, for a few days things may be a little bumpy around here. Keep your seat belt fastened and your hands inside the car until it comes to a complete stop.

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