I haven’t been following the story too closely, but there’s been a small amount of ruckus lately because the CEO of Userland Software, John Robb, abruptly left the company, and when he did, his entire weblog disappeared from the web.
Nobody seems to be too sure just why his entire archive of posts disappeared. Did John take them down? Did Dave Winer (founder of Userland)? Were they just deleted because they lived on Userland’s server, and as an ex-employee, John wasn’t allowed to use Userland’s hosting anymore? Lots of questions, as as yet, few answers.
Rick Klau is concerned about the situation (rightly so), and ends his post with the following advice:
Final lesson from this situation: never, ever blog at a domain that’s not owned by you. Don’t blog on your employer’s site, don’t blog on your blogging application’s site — make sure your blog lives (and stays!) on your own domain.
This comes at an interesting time for me. Part of my motivation for applying for the TypePad beta program was that, after running my website off of my own server under my desk for years, I’m considering finally relinquishing that amount of control and moving to a hosted solution. Should I do so, I’d be doing exactly what Rick advises against, and, admittedly, there is a small amount of risk in that. Should Six Apart (creators of MovableType and TypePad) fold, my site and all of it’s pages could go up in smoke (for what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s a very high probability of that).
However, it seems to me there’s a very simple solution to this, that, for me, outweighs any risk of my web-based life disappearing into the great bit bucket in the sky, and that’s simply this: back up your files. I know that MovableType has an export feature that allows you to save a local copy of every post on your weblog, and I would assume (though I don’t know) that the other blogging systems have a similar feature. It’s useful both as an importing mechanism when changing sites or weblogs, but it also makes a great backup mechanism. Ever since I suffered the loss of my last webserver, I’ve been making sure to export my site on a regular basis. If anything goes all aflooey (a technical term, to be sure), I’m covered.
It may very well be that John has done just this, and, once he’s settled in at wherever he’s going, his entire website will reappear on the web at a new address. From the number of posts I’ve seen about his ‘disappearance’, I’d say that there are a fair amount of people hoping for that to be the case. Hopefully it’s not too long before we find out.
In the end, then, I’d worry less about relinquishing control of your archives to an employer or to your blogging host company, than I would about making sure you have a current backup so that, should disaster strike, recovery is just a few clicks away.
(via Erik)