You know when people tell you to “Back Up” your work, “just incase something bad happens”, well guess what!?

The server hosting Laocook.com and our sister sites received the follow message.

“Your server has experienced a rather severe RAID / Hard drive malfunction and will need to be restored from available backup data. A new OS is being prepared at this point in time and we will begin a restore from backup when the initial preparations have been completed.”

Hmm, okay, that is unfortunate and we are down. But our hoster prouds itself on its extensive backup facilities. All will be well..at least..that is what we thought until we got the next message from our technician:

“Unfortunately during the restore we noticed that the backups for the server were all corrupt and unusable…”

Hmmm, several 4 letter words spring to mind

Luckily for us, Darly found a few RSS Feeds and was able to bring back some of our pages. She also did a Back Up of nearly all the sites last August (before changing to Server “Titanic” )

Working all through the night, she has painstakingly put back together the majority of Laocook.com, though we are sad to say that most of your comments (since the last Back Up) have been lost.

However, we are still here and ask you to be patient whilst we repost the missing photos, and piece back together the site and restore it to what it was.

In the meantime, the site may look a bit jumbled up