What happened
Yeah everything's gone. The hard drive that was carrying all of my sites died... permanently. My webhost tried several fixes but it wouldn't even work as a secondary drive. It was dead and I have no backups.
No Backups?
Back when I used to make money off my sites I religiously backed up my domains, sometimes spending $50 or more per month to make sure they were cared for. As my money waned I found that I couldn't afford the paid services and after a lot of research I ended up choosing Amazon S3 and Duplicity/Duply. Duplicity was free and Amazon S3 only cost in the single digits per month so no problem. Then one day I needed to restore my sites and Duplicity took a giant crap. I managed to get most of them up, fighting through errors and non restorable files but DeadlyAmazons was permanently gone. Some key files were non restorable and Duplicity would crash part way down a giant directory of files. NEVER use duplicity.
Okay, so I gave up on Duplicity and I couldn't really afford the money or time for any of the major backup options. I was SHOCKED that my Operating System, CPanel had a backup option but it only backed up TO THE ORIGINAL DRIVE! Idiotic to the extreme! I saw that there were some plans to implement Google Drive or Dropbox but that was maybe sometime in the future. I wrote down on my extensive 'to do' list that I should find some way to back up my sites but I ended up never having the time or money to do so and here we are!
What Now?
I'll be auctioning off all my domain names. I haven't decided where or when yet. I'm working every day, very busy, broke and have lost most of my interest in necro/snuff so I probably won't be doing much in the community. You probably won't see me posting art or commenting on the forums. If you have any questions you can reach me at templarart at gmail dot com.
Thanks
So thanks to all the people who enjoyed my websites. I would've kept them going had this not happened. I appreciate all the interactions I've had and wish the best for you all.
John Templar - templarart at gmail dot com