I found out today that a great Photoshop site with lots of useful tutorials and tips along with tons of beautiful images vanished because of a website server crash. The site is Photoshoptalent.com. I used to visit their site almost daily to learn more about Photoshop. Then about a month ago, I noticed that the site was down for a while.

Server Crash
Now that my day job’s workload is getting normal, I tried to go to the site to learn some more tips. To my surprise, photoshoptalent.com resolved to pxleyes.com. The home page looks similar but the tutorials I was looking for were not there. I looked around more and found the webmaster’s message titled “What Happened to PST?” The webmaster said,

To my deepest regret I have to inform you that the PST server had a major hardware failure and everything on the hard drive was wiped. The last few days we were trying to recover as much data as possible, but until now it is unsuccessful… every file is corrupted or broken. This is also the reason why the site was down for an entire week. The only backup there was, was one from several months ago, which was in the same server and disappeared with all the rest.

I was appalled. It was a great site with tons of good contents. All of them are lost…. I am sure the webmaster and his/her community will rebuild the site again. But it won’t be the same. Well, the new site may be better!

Importance of Backups
I do backup my PC/laptops data almost religiously for various reasons as you can see in this post. But I haven’t backed up my website for a while. As are most WordPress-powered sites, I need to back up databases in addition to regular files. Learning about what happened to Photoshoptalent.com was a good reminder for me. I’ll do a full backup tonight.