We talk a lot about things like blogging, selling information products online, and maintaining a professional website. What we don’t talk about much is the technical side of that. Today I’d like to share a short story about a major tech-induced headache I suffered over the weekend, as a reminder that no matter how comfortable we get with the technology we use regularly, we should never take basic caution for granted.

As I mentioned a few days ago, two of my other writing blogs were merged with All Freelance Writing this weekend. I’ve moved and merged probably around a dozen blogs over the last few years, so the process is one I’m very familiar with.

Moving the content to this blog went as smoothly as could be expected. The hard part was over–or so I thought. All that was left was the redirection (altering the .htaccess file on the server to point each old article URL to their new homes on this blog, so traffic and links don’t drop off).

I spent several hours putting together the huge list of redirects. It’s truly a mind-numbing task. I finished the changes. I saved them. I tested them. Everything was perfect.

Then it was time to delete all of the other site files.

Out of habit, I selected everything and deleted all files in that site folder. I often do this when I don’t need to keep much, because the file manager in my control panel was always designed to then list those files in the trash can, where you could easily restore the one or two you wanted to keep.

A few months back my host upgraded that control panel. While I was initially annoyed that they did this without any kind of announcement or warning first, I got over it and got used to the new layouts. For the most part everything functioned the same, and only the look seemed different (for the features I use at least).

This weekend I learned that I was wrong.

I learned the hard way that the trash can no longer existed, including the option to restore files. In other words, I accidentally deleted hours worth of work because I didn’t take the time to look first. I took what I had before for granted–I assumed it would still be there.

What that means for readers is that all All Book Marketing URLs currently (and temporarily) are pointing to the homepage of AFW. By this time next week, I promise to fix that, and to also get the second blog fully redirected. What that means for me is that I’ll be spending quite a lot of time not only repopulating that redirect list, but having to dig up the old URLs in cache files or from other sources as the files themselves are deleted from the old blog now. Not fun.

Hopefully you can learn from my mistake and be even more careful when it comes to moving, deleting, and changing important files of any kind. And for goodness sake, back up everything and back it up often. You never know when something you’re counting on will simply be gone.