My apologies on this dilatory post explaining why all the Graywolfslair links in the various forums no longer work. I was hoping to resolve it before now, but alas that is not to be!
The short version is that Vultr had an equipment failure and lost the cloud containing my site, as well as the backups my webmaster had stored there.
Everything is no more. Imagine my chagrin at that was the third time I’ve populated a site with articles, starting with Skunk Pharm Research, The Alchemist Resource, and then Graywolfslair.com.
My webmaster is putting together a new Graywolfslair.com site using a more dependable and reliable host who backups up on a separate drive and I have purchased a 16TB auxiliary drive for a second backup.
I don’t have an estimate of how long it will take to get back on line, and sadly the existing links will never work again, but Graywolfslair.com will return and I will keep you updated on progress.
Every time you hit one of those dead links, I encourage you to remember that it was Vultr who took that support away from you.
I wish I could say that they were remorseful and helpful in mine and my webmasters attempts in recovering the Lair after their crash, but alas that was not the case, so I do not recommend them for a site host.
Knowing your IT Guy, I’m surprised there wasn’t another backup. I had a college professor that would have us write our long essays, walk in to class, run them through a shredder, sit down with blank pages and a pencil, and write them over for a grade. He was convinced that somehow made it all fresher and better. May you find new nuggets of gold in the recreation!
There are a few applications available that can download the latest backup from the archive, free and paid. That might make it easier to see what all is there.
Maybe some folks with IT skills (maybe they run a forum wink wink) can mirror the content, at least privately, so that valuable wealths of knowledge don’t disappear for everyone.
DataHoarding is becoming more important than ever!
A GitHub repository can easily be used to backup a website. Unless there’s gigabytes of images, a free public repository will work fine.
Developing on the production instance Isn’t a great idea. if your server goes down and your project lives in a repository then you just deploy to another server.