Ok... I know this is an old excuse, but it's sort of true.  What really happened is that I was reorganizing some information on the Ittrium web site and temporarily removed the product blog where I had been posting.  I was planning to move it to a new location on the help site.  Then I got busy with other work and forgot about the blog for a couple of weeks.  When I returned to post my next blog entry my blog was gone.

What happened?  It turns out that the Recycle Bin got the best of me.  By default, the recycle bin is scheduled to empty automatically every Sunday an 10 p.m. central time.  When I moved the blog out of the site it was placed in the recycle bin which is what I expected to happen.   When I forgot to move it back on the site, it became a target for clean up and was removed from the site during at the standard scheduled time.

At this point, I didn't panic since we automatically backup the web site every day, but it turns out that the backups are only retained for two weeks.  So the blog was gone...

Here's the good news...

  1. The web site backups were easily restored and had a full copy of the web site from two weeks back.
  2. The recycle bin processing is working as expected.

This incident also sparked an interesting discussion in the office and we are now considering a new recycle bin aging process to limit this sort of thing happening to customers.  The aging process is simple.  The oldest items in the recycle bin get removed first and we wouldn't remove any item from the site until it had been in the recycle bin for at least 4 weeks.  This means if you cut an item out of your site on Saturday, it wouldn't be deleted for 29 days (4 weeks plus 1 day).

If you have thoughts, concerns or comments on this matter, please feel free to comment on this post.  In the meantime, give us a call within two weeks if you've removed something from the site and need it restored.