CouchSurfing.com, the travel lodging community site for hostel-phobic backpackers that we first wrote about back in May, suffered a massive data crash three weeks ago. The site's staff, a group of volunteers currently based in Montreal, Canada, were running a few scripts on their test database when they accidentally lost their real database. The crew at CouchSurfing.com watched in horror as all of the content they had collected from their community members -- profiles, contact information and photos for some 90,000 users all around the world -- disappeared.

Since the folks who run the site live the lifestyle they preach, they didn't exactly have the funds or resources to dedicate to regular data backups. No website code or static data was lost, just tens of thousands of profiles, stories, photos, emails, and messages left by CouchSurfing.com's devotees. The team was devastated.

The worldwide community that the site helped to create sprang into action immediately. Donations were made while support sites and beg pages popped up. Community members from all over the world chipped in and helped out by responding to emails, making phones calls, writing code and locating data storage. The CouchSurfing Collective had a new site up and running within a few days, and people began re-building their profiles with few complaints. The online community was essentially forced to start over from scratch, but the CSC managed to salvage bits and pieces of the lost data from Google's web cache and local machines at their headquarters.

The Collective ran a webcam so CouchSurfing users could watch as the team cranked out a new site in less than a week. They have since posted a participation page thanking every individual person (I counted 39, but there were probably many anonymous helpers) who lent out coding skills or donated time, food and knowledge.

It's really refreshing to see good, old-fashioned community interaction saving the day. The more time we spend behind our profiles, blogs and email clients, the more we tend to forget that we're all just humans communicating with one another and forming bonds.

This statement from the site's founder, Casey Fenton, says it best: "CouchSurfing is more than just the data. The data was dead, but the people, the true heart of the project, were still very much alive."