I’m not sure whether too many people noticed but a few weeks back, this blog briefly went offline.  I had got a warning email from my hosting company that I had some content on the site that was not consistent with my plan.  One of those files was an old file I had stored there to share with someone so I deleted it.  The other was a folder that a backup plugin uses to create temporary files that are then sent to a cloud service.  I left that one alone.

I got a second email with a similar warning, despite the first file having been deleted but discovered that the account was already suspended.  There then followed a fair bit if discussion with their tech support to give me enough access to allow me to actually delete the files.  When I got in via FTP, I came to see their worry.  The backup folder is supposed to be emptied after the files are copied off.  That is happening fine now but there were two years of daily backups sitting in there that never got deleted.  Over 4,00 zip files with a huge amount of data in them.  No wonder they were annoyed.

Deleting them took a while to do, not least because they took longer than the temporary access period I had been granted so we had a few cycles of getting back in again.  However, they all got removed eventually and I was allowed to go back to normal.