TL;DR:
At some point I lost the database of this blog. I can’t recall the reason or the exact date, though it was probably somewhere in 2010. Using the Google cache I was able to recover most of the posts.
A few weeks back the database of this blog managed to corrupt itself somehow. (I suspect a dist-upgrade on my server is to blame for that, though I’m not sure.) After spending several hours trying to restore the database and learning many things about InnoDB that I’d rather not have to know, I figured I’d have to resort to manually restoring my blog again.
Why manually? Didn’t I have any backups?! I’m quite lazy and had not gotten around to automatically making backups of my blog. Since I’m only adding content here rather slowly, manually doing a backup every few months is just fine. And I actually did that. Those backups were not backed up though, so I lost them when one of my disks crashed a few weeks ago. Ugh.
The timing of this was also unfortunate as I used to have a recent sql dump of my database lying around from when I moved my blog a few months ago. It seems like I deleted it in the meanwhile though.
Funnily enough I was able to restore all posts up to May 2011 using a dump from my original blog database, on my old webhost. The only reason it’s still there is because (a) I’m to lazy to clean it up, and (b) I’m to lazy to cancel the contract I don’t really need anymore. Sometimes laziness can be a real asset 🙂
The more recent posts I restored manually from the cache of my RSS reader. Sadly enough that leaves a gap from May 2011 to March 2012, which probably contains two dozen blog posts I was not able to restore.
March 2014 edit: Found the remaining posts on archive.org and inserted them \o/
I’m sorry for your loss. =P
Maybe it was the NSA that corrupted your system somehow. You are a Mediawiki developer and might have access to some (zero-day) security problems about Mediawiki. And as a lot of companies internally use Mediawiki, the NSA might use that knowledge to spy on them.
The simplest explanation here is that I’m a louzy sysadmin. NSA involvement is not needed to corrupt my blog database. Which does not mean the NSA to not have access to my server – I’d just not expect them to use such access to break things of no consequence (bigger picture wise) such as my blog.