Always Backup Your Work

You may have noticed that my last few posts have gone missing. I installed a fresh copy of vBulletin (forum software) on my site last night and it completely wiped out my site’s database — including my blog. While installing vBulletin, the program said it detected an old installation of the VB database and gave me the option to delete the old data and start over with a new copy. I wanted to start fresh, so I clicked the option to delete the old data. A clever alert came up:

WARNING WILL ROBINSON … WARNING!

You’d think I would have taken a hint here. But it said that this option would wipe out the old vBulletin database which is exactly what I wanted. To my surprise, it wiped out the entire database, not just the vBulletin portion. Needless to say, I was rather upset at losing my entire blog.

Thank goodness for Google’s caching of old web pages. I did a search out at Google for site:emediastrategist.com, found most of my old pages cached, and was able to reconstruct most of my blog except for the last five posts: two about vertical search, one about keywords people use to find your site, and two about online audience and advertising measurement.

Over the next week, I hope to re-write these posts. Thanks for your patience in the meantime. Oh, and ALWAYS back up your work!



3 Responses to “ “Always Backup Your Work”

  1. Tony Angelo says:
    May 12, 2006 at 11:57 am

    Eric, If your WordPress database was shared by your vBulletin database, but seperated with only prefixes, such as wp_ and vb_, the vBulletin install app may not have been able to differenciate between the two. Was that the case? If so, and if that is still the case, you may want to consider seperating your MySQL databses for each application if your host allows. If that wasn’t the case, you should really tell Jelsoft… even though they did warn you.

    Reply
  2. Eric says:
    May 15, 2006 at 11:05 am

    Hi Tony. Yes, I believe that was the case. WP dropped the entire database instead of just the tables. VB did warn me, but I thought they’d only drop their tables, not the entire database. Just a minor clarification in their warning would have been enough to help me. Nonetheless, I should have known better to back up my site before installing a major piece of software. That was just stupid on my part and I’ve certainly learned that lesson … again.

    Reply
  3. Nik says:
    June 8, 2006 at 12:02 pm

    Eric, years ago, I added this command to my web host’s crontab to run daily around 1:15 AM. (I try to avoid running stuff at midnight, since my host runs backups at that time):

    mysqldump -u [username] -p [password] [databasename] | gzip > db.sql.gz

    Just creates a full database dump as a gzipped file every day. Saved me a zillion times.

    I eventually made this a bit fancier and did a backup each day of the week (numbered 0-7 so as to recycle the backup) and a monthly backup as well (for the times when things were broken more than a week). That’s plenty of protection, provided you have the disk space to store it.

    Reply

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