It’s been a rather dramatic day for beards.org. The server on which the site is hosted suffered a disk failure that required restoring the site from a backup. Unfortunately, the latest backup available was from a few days ago. So the beards of the world gallery has temporarily lost three photos and the view counters have been set back a bit. A new comment for the blog was also lost. The gallery images will be restored soon and the commenter on the blog will be invited to re-submit.

While the loss of data is not something enjoyable, at least the data lost this time was relatively minor. Ironically, I was going to take a new backup earlier today, but the server outage had just hit. Had I made it in under the wire, the data loss essentially would have been nil. The lesson here for everyone is one that’s been repeated time and again: back up, back up, back up your data! You’ll be glad that you did.

Also, as a result of the server outage, the site was missing in action for most of the day. I’m happy that it’s back now. I hope that you are, too!

As noted here and elsewhere, beards have been experiencing an upsurge in popularity lately. Is it a trend? The trouble with trends is that they come and go. Beards need not and should not come and go based on the whims of trendiness and fads.

When the current beard trend fades — which it likely will, as most trends do — many of the brave new beards will probably pass into history. How do we keep from losing the momentum of the current upswing in favor of beards? It’s not easy. The best thing to do is to think about beards as a component of manhood and not a fashion accessory. Grow the beard that you want. Don’t worry about whether it’s trendy or not. Be yourself and make your own statement by growing the beard that pleases you.