So…you as my readers may have noticed that Petoholics Anonymous disappeared for about a week and is now back, albeit with missing posts and other bits. Hopefully I haven’t lost a lot of readers in that time because they thought I had just disappeared off the face of the earth.

I won’t give you all the long ranty details but I will say that 2 of my domains, including this one, got hacked by some religious extremist who thought it was great to spread their propaganda at the expense of someone who blogs and makes websites simply as a hobby. Great work, guys. From the sounds of it, it wasn’t anything on my end but instead a security backdoor in my webhost’s server. And there were at least 3 other accounts hit by the same group so I wasn’t the only one.

Myst told me about the hacking as I was away on vacation at the time and much more interested in spending time with Kazi than blogging. I in turn notified my webhost about the hacking and they decided to “terminate” the domains accounts that had been hacked. Then followed several days of slow responses from them, where it went from “Just reactivate those accounts and remove the hacker’s code :)” to “You can’t find the accounts? We’ll look into it” to “It’s all gone. Hope you have backups”.

So all the files and databases from my two hacked domains plus, for some reason,  Kazi’s blog (despite the fact that he had never been hacked)…all gone.

See that? That is not my happy face.

I know that the only person to blame for not having a great backup is myself but I mean…really? Did they have to take the lazy route and just delete everything and clean their hands of the issue?

*cough* Anyways, I did say I wasn’t going to rant (I really only did a little).

So, over the next couple of days, I’m going to work on restoring those lost pictures and posts as best I can. All I can say is thank god for search engines that cache websites. All I’m really going to lose is the comments on each post since March.

If you see anything missing or not working that was posted after March 2010, please let me know.

And let my example be a warning to all bloggers: back up your stuff regularly. I know I’m going to be buying a backup tool for just that.