europlus 
Well, just after International Backup Day, I proved to myself my own saying that “no matter how many backups you have, it’s always too few”.
For some reason, my GlobalTalk node related to my Apple Internet Router Administrator’s Guide—Addendum I released last year was not being backed up like all my other VMs.
I just run a cron job once a week (Sunday early morning, my least likely time to be awake) that vacuums most of the files on my Ubuntu VMs and zips them up into a new archive in a folder on my Mac. I just delete the old archive after the new one completes.
I think perhaps because it was such a sparse node while I was setting up last year – just sort of a “first port of call” for people following the instructions in my Addendum – that I didn’t pay heed to the Three Golden Rules of Computing™:
1. Backup.
2. Backup!!
3. BACKUP!!!
Couple that with a “delete the whole VM” command being right next to the “reboot vm” command (great UI, folks!), them both asking for some sort of confirmation ("delete boot disk, too” vs “reboot immediately”) which my mind conflated after 10-15 reboots, and boom! VM and boot disk gone, unrecoverable.
Thankfully, it’s not a critical machine, and other than it being a slow VM shape, I’ve been able to get something back online reasonably quickly (and it’s fully clean, so there’s that) – and yes, I have set up the cron job on the new VM!
I’ve lost some greets from the last year, almost all of which are on my main GlobalTalk node anyway, and the collection of files I put in the AppleShared folder for guests (I have all of it, just don’t have the particular combination of files I put in there).
There’s only one silver lining – I was able to test my setup disk images from go to woe again after not having done so since I last revised them last year...they work!
As a celebration of getting the node back online, guests who access the share will see the icon I was working on earlier tonight. More celebratory for me than anyone else, but still.
Don’t make me tap the sign! ☝🏻