I'm fucked...
 

I'm starting to get the feeling that there's external forces telling me I'm really not supposed to be working online anymore, and should begin venturing into other areas. What a fucken month... I'm generally great with backups, but this month there were quite a few hard drives flowing around, I became a little lazy, and it appears that I may have now lost an unreal amount of work, which I can't afford to lose. I don't know what I'll do.

There was a bit of a server reshuffling a few weeks ago, and I had a good amount backed up on one of the servers that went offline. Sure enough, I delayed reuploading the backups to the new server because I was busy, and a week later my laptop ended up with water damage. Took it in, and found out I'm now the proud owner of a $1400 doorstop. Great!

So I lost the Windows IDE that I developed for my infrastructure, which I've been working on for a couple years. At this point I just think, shit happens, life goes on, and no point in getting angry or frustrated, because that's not going to solve anything. Thankfully, all the problem solving and development decisions were done and in my mind, so borrowed a friend's extra laptop, put in a 90 hour week, and have a "quick and dirty" version of the IDE back again. Ok, at least I can work again now.

Ended up with a new desktop to work from, and off I go! Couple days later, power outage, and when power comes back on it sends a surge which fucks up my modem. Alright, go buy a new modem, get it setup, and have internet again. Next morning, internet's gone again. Looked around, and realized the line was chewed to shit (we have two puppies). Alright, head into town, get all the shit needed, and string a new line from the box outside to the modem. This time through the roof, so the dogs can't touch it.

Great, got internet again, and back at 'er! Stupid me though, didn't bother downloading backups from my server to my new desktop though. Did a typical reboot of server this morning, and it didn't come back up. Submit support request, and a couple hours later server is back online, but it's been wiped clean. All the data is gone. And this isn't a 90 hour week to get back, but probably 4 months of 90 hour weeks. Fuck!

And I was just about to launch xMarkPro too, a high-end marketing system that I'm sure would have helped many of you. Automated domain creation & management with support for dedicated LINUX, CPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, etc. Piwik pre-installed for traffic analytics, pulls sales stats automatically from sponsors, full media management, link tracking, import Wordpress themes, blogs, and loads more. You could see statistics of your entire network of 300 domains, down to exactly how one specific ad image was converting, and everything in between. Overall stats, by domain, page, sponsor, country, ad set, media item, link code, etc. Plus loads of AJAX, so no waiting for page reloads. View traffic, clicks, sales, rebills, refunds, ratios, and so on from one consolidated system. Get pissed at a sponsor? 30 seconds, and links & promo materials spread though your network of hundreds of pages are changed. GeoIP rules, plus loads of other cool shit.

All gone though. :( That truly sucks, because I was heavily depending on that. I know the software industry enough to know it would have brought it decent sales, easily afforded our lifestyle, plus gave me the breathing room to concentrate on my other ideas. Now I'm just some jackoff sitting in NE Thailand, with nothing to show for the countless number of hours he invested.

If that data is actually gone, I'm not sure what I'll do. Life usually has its way of working out for me though, so I'm sure I'll figure it out. Maybe it's time to get out of the software industry all together. I'm one of the best at what I do, but after 10 years, you lose your passion.

My apologies for the long-winded post, but felt like ranting somewhere.

If you need the data off the hard drive for the laptop, why don't you take it apart, get an adapter to connect to another machine and grab the data off of it? I mean, it sucks that the laptop is dead from the water damage but the hard drive and it's contents may be just fine...

As a person who has gone thru many data losses, I can totally feel you on that. Whether it be external forces or not, it sounds like you had some pretty unique stuff to help others out. If you still feel like putting in the time to get it out, I'd highly suggest you do. If you are not motivated about it, move on to something else that may take a lot less time, finish that, and get the motivation to work on that project again, if you can.

Take it easy, man :(

Are you sure that all this is just coincidence? Perhaps someone is sabotaging your stuff. Hmm... maybe a good idea in your case would be keeping the data additionally backed up on more stable memory like flash drive or even dvd and always close at hand.

When things have gone against me, normally I've managed to turn things around and somehow things have even worked out better than before the problem. Having said that, I don't think I've lost as much work as you've just lost. If you create it all a second time I'm sure it will be even better and more successful on the long term