You may have been wondering what the “hack” (sorry) has been going on with A Model Recommends over the last week. My bad punning should be a bit of a clue – I got hacked. I got hacked bad. Real bad.

Yes, Dear Readers, the worst possible scenario that you can imagine – not only did I get hacked, but the hacking happened a while ago and the virus had been sat in my database for weeks. Every single file in my database was infected and that has meant wiping the whole lot and starting again.

I know.

I’m adopting this quite jolly tone because the whole thing is so devastating that I can’t even begin to think about it properly – over one thousand posts, most with images or video embedded, all infected with some evil grub. The entire structure of the website has to be built up from scratch. I’m still deliberating how far back to go with rescuing the archives – I definitely have everything from February 2011 – but I would appreciate your input on this. Would it bother you not to be able to see the first ever posts? Do you think it might be nice to have a fresh start? If I don’t rebuild the archives (costly!) then I’ll lose all of your wonderful comments and conversation threads, all of the things that make A Model Recommends a joy for me to work on…

As it stands, I can add new things from this moment on, so you may see a flurry of activity over the next few days! I’ll make a decision on the archives by the end of the week – personally, I think that they are well worth saving, but then a part of me would welcome a bit of a fresh start at the moment. I’ve had a terrible couple of weeks website aside, this was just the explosive icing on the tragedy cake.

Before you ask, yes I did backup – I paid for it to always be backed up securely. By my hosting provider. The backups also had the virus present. (It just gets better and better!) So a warning to all self-hosted peeps – backup all of your files (ALL OF THEM) on a regular basis even if you pay someone else to do it for you. It’s better to spend a few minutes backing up than losing…er…approximately TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTY HOURS WORTH OF WORK!

Bye bye for now – I’m off to stick forks into my eyeballs and cheese-grater my legs. That’s what I do these days for enjoyment…