Richard Stallman Has Resurrected Lost Updates
2 days ago we said that Richard Stallman (RMS) had apparently not made - or had not ensured the host would always be making - regular enough backups, so the site came back with an out-of-date snapshot (about 2 months old after almost a week of downtime).
Whether the "diffs" were retrieved from some online/browser cache or local backups of RMS... we might never know, but lost updates have seemingly been restored fully. We doubt they found a newer snapshot to restore from and the caches may be outdated (the latest updates for August predate the incident by 3 days).
We didn't ask about it. We could contact RMS, but he has more urgent things to do. We don't want to unnecessarily bother him.
One reader told us last week that "Richard Stallman's private site www.stallman.org has been inaccessible for more than 24 hours."
"I've notified the maintainers," he later said. "It appear to be a hosting service issue."
Indeed, we heard the same. The site came back online 3 days ago. "As of morning JST September 5th the site is up again," the reader told us (that tells readers about his locality).
"The newest articles are from September 4th," he added. "There is a wide gap with no articles between July 2 - Sept 4." ("Stallman's private site back up" was the title)
This has since then been rectified and everything seems to be there, even the random old photos. "The gap has been plugged," he told us this morning. "Now there are articles for July and August."
We are very glad that, one way or another, they brought back online a functional snapshot and it seems like no data was lost. It probably required a lot of work though.
Make backups. Every day. It might save you a lot of time and work one day. █

