Those of you who know me personally know how much I cared about my website. I wasn’t always as active as I wanted to be, but the site meant a lot to me. It gave me a sense of being good at something, and a sense of all that cooking being useful. So you can imagine my shock when I got an e-mail saying I had lost all 500 recipes, and 3 years of hard work.
The server had crashed. Even though I paid for the service, there was no backup. My first reaction was no reaction at all really. I simply couldn’t believe everything was gone, and my mind was in a blank state. I guess I was kind of expecting somebody to go “Oh wait, there’s a backup right here!” But when I got another e-mail, which now stated there really was no backup, reality hit me hard. I suppose I was already getting to the state of losing hope that there would be a backup at that time, so I didn’t cry, but instead I was literally sick for a full day.
And part of me was telling me to snap out of it. “It’s just a hobby, stop making such a fuss out of it” was one of the things I kept telling myself over and over. And I told myself I was the only one using the website, so it wasn’t a big deal. But when I started getting messages from people, asking me if I happened to have this or that recipe somewhere else, I did realise that my work was appreciated by more people than just me.
So when my sister offered to make a new design for when the website would go back online, I decided to not allow myself to just quit (which, I must admit, was somewhat my intention). I (well, my sister) found a more reliable server service, and my sister started on the design. And it is better than the previous website was, the new version looks more professional, is more versatile and allows me to post items wherever I want. In theory I can change the entire website myself, but I am not very confident in my computer-skills at all, but I luckily have a very talented sister who is great with these things.
Now I write my recipes in a text file on my computer, store them on my external hard drive and then upload them to the website. Should my hard-drive crash, everything is on the website. Should the website crash, I will not lose 500 recipes again.
I hope this website will provide an even better recipe database than the previous website, and I am looking forward to your reactions. If you made a recipe, feel free to leave a comment with your experiences and possible advice.
Much Love
Claudia