A reminder about backups

I'm a huge advocate of taking backups of things.  So much so, I've got my own home server backing up to "the cloud" with all of my files on it.  It needs a bit of an organisational shuffle I think, but the idea is there.

One place I don't have a proper backup strategy (and I really need to put one in place) is here, my website.  As a result, I've been playing around with things (in a live environment, bad I know!) and have lost most of the images in my gallery.  Fortunately I do have originals of them, but I've got to go through at some point soon and re-upload them.  I really don't want a whole load of 404s showing up in Google.

How did this happen?  Quite simply I've been in the process of moving my private Github repositories over to Gitlab so I can save myself some money each month.  Once that was done, I checked out the Gitlab copy of my website and put that live thinking I had the images in there just to pull down.  Not so for the gallery, rightly so, as git isn't the place for those things.  I had made a copy of the website folder where the images were stored, but that didn't seem to copy the images over.  As a result, when I deleted the original folder, it took the images with it which weren't backed up.

The lesson.  Back everything up.  Even if you think it's backed up somewhere, back it up again.

I don't have a copy of the galleries locally to upload them again (I thought I did, but I was wrong), so my only option is to go through them and re-upload the images from scratch.  My job for the weekend is to get the galleries back online with the images.