Comments on: Repairs, Restorations, Reassemblages

By: Pixel Pages: Doonesbury swipes at digital, hackers attack Blind Ferret « The Comics Observer

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:01:36 +0000

[...] Hackers took down the main servers of Blind Ferret Entertainment, which provides hosting for a number of popular webcomics, reports [...]

By: News and notes from all around 2/7/2013: Alonso, Walking Dead, JMS, Venture Bros.

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:01:00 +0000

[...] Miss America Chavez from Young Avengers above. § Gary Tyrell has the harrowing story of how the Blind Ferret website—host to many popular webcomics— was hacked and the backups were [...]

By: Comics A.M. | Siegel & Shuster heirs fight DC’s interference claim | Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources – Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:00:21 +0000

[...] Webcomics | Malicious hackers hit the Blind Ferret servers last week, and they didn’t just wipe out the websites that host Least I Could Do, Girls with Slingshots and other high-profile webcomics — they also wiped out the backups. Gary Tyrell has the story and advises creators to have multiple backups in multiple locations. [Fleen] [...]

By: Mark V

Mark V — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 04:46:13 +0000

Speaking of backups, the recently Kickstarted “Git Annex Assistant” (http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/) is worth keeping an eye on. Git is a version control tool that you can use to keep track of different local revisions of your comic/website/etc. The assistant adds support for large files, a user-friendly web interface, and tools for keeping track of multiple backups on different computers/drives/etc. I think it’s still “beta”, but development/debugging seems to be going very quickly.

P.S. Git also enables silly tricks like this: http://eptcomic.com/ept1movie.htm

By: Sabin

Sabin — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:35:48 +0000

Wow that is awful! 2013 is shaping up to be a year off a**holes- can we stop this trend? Now to go back up my webcomic for the first time…… yikes!

By: Morgan Wick

Morgan Wick — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 02:46:47 +0000

Also, top webcomics should be hosted by as many different people as possible. We shouldn’t have something like five of the top ten webcomics knocked offline for days because of an attack on a single host. This isn’t the first time in just the last few months S*P and GwS have been knocked offline.

Also, as someone using Archive Binge to read GwS and having to put up with Comic Rocket’s crawler picking up every last blog post as if it were a comic, I’m not exactly shedding tears for the lost blog posts. (And no, they can’t be recovered that way.)

As for your point about backups, it can be distilled into one: never rely on your server company for your backups. Even if they survive an attack, your server company might just decide to be dicks one day for no reason, especially if you decide to leave them some day for any reason. And there is ESPECIALLY no excuse if you use WordPress; it comes with a built-in exporting feature that exports basically everything text-based into an XML file. (Have I not used it since 2009 on my own blog? Yes, yes I have not.)