SVN – It’s the Law
For the past few weeks I've been working for Harkins, specifically for NearbyGamers, to build a Facebook application. Work was going nicely, and this afternoon I finally got close enough to being done to set a release date for myself: Friday afternoon. Now, if that went as planned, would I be writing this post? I left my SSH session open, grabbed some dinner, and sat down to play Chez Geek with a friend. I wandered back about an hour later to find my SSH session hung. This happens often, not sure why, so I thought nothing of it, closed the terminal and logged back in. But when I got to the file I'd been working on, it appeared to hang again. Maybe the file was getting too big to load in a quick manner? 10 seconds later and vi still showed no data. Then, to my horror, I realized it was because the file was empty. A quick ls -al showed the following:
<18:00:53 nearbygamers>$ ls -al
...
-rw-r--r-- 1 snarky pg4xxxx 9548 Jul 15 17:42 facebook.php
-rwxr-xr-x 1 snarky pg4xxxx 23146 Jul 15 17:42 facebookapi_php5_restlib.php
-rw-rw-r-- 1 snarky pg4xxxx 0 Jul 15 17:42 functions.php
drwxrwxr-x 3 snarky pg4xxxx 4096 Jul 15 17:42 images
-rw-rw-r-- 1 snarky pg4xxxx 2154 Jul 15 17:42 index.php
...
The file was zeroed. And it happened, according to the timestamp, just 15 minutes before I got back to my computer. How or why that happened, I have no clue, and this shouldn't really matter except I had no version control. That's right, I once again decided that this project would be over before any catastrophes could happen. Man was I wrong. To say I freaked out would be an understatement, and finally I filed a ticket with my host, Dreamhost, pleading with them for any backups they might have. Literally within a minute I got a response which pointed to a page on their wiki about a wonderful (and secretive) backup system of theirs. After a little digging and a call to Harkins, I was able to pull a file out of thin air. During the time that I had waited before submitting the ticket I set up the SVN repo for this project, it took a whopping 2 minutes to create, move my files, check out in place, and do an initial import of all the other files. All that grief to save 2 minutes, I'll never make that mistake again.
Now, at this point I have to give major kudos to Dreamhost. Not only do they have the system in place to save my butt when its my fault and they don't owe me any help, but their crack support team was able to get back to me minutes after submitting my ticket, and I'm writing this just about half an hour after I submitted that ticket. I have my file back (minus maybe an hour or two) and my peace of mind to sleep tonight.
I've been a Dreamhost fan for a long time, they've got great servers for the sites I build, very decent uptime, and Shell access that I oh so love. This may just be the last in a series of events that made me love their service, but it is by far the most important, and telling about their service and their customer-oriented mindset in general.
Thanks Dreamhost, you've got a customer as long as you're in service!
