Taking My Own Advice: BACKUP!

I almost lost my entire blog last week.

Something (I have theories about what) somehow managed to corrupt my WordPress database, erasing every entry since 2008. That’s pretty much all my clips and everything “important.”

My webhost apparently makes automatic backups of the database but deletes them after only a few days. I didn’t notice the problem until it was too late, so the auto-backups were no use (they were backups of the corrupted database).

Luckily, the last time I ran WordPress Automatic Update, I did what I normally don’t bother to do: download the backups the plugin automatically creates for you.

Those backups were two weeks old, but they were blessedly uncorrupted. I was able to restore everything but what I’d written in the past two weeks, and manually re-post everything from those two weeks.

I am a fanatic about backing up my computer after a spectacular hard drive failure a few years ago: I have Mozy set up to back up 2 gigs of what I consider most important, plus Dropbox keeps cloud copies of everything I’ve worked with recently, and on top of all that, Time Machine for everything else.

But until I almost lost my blog I was very sloppy about backing it up. Because, hey, it’s in the cloud. It’s fine.

Apparently that’s not so true. The moral of the story is: wherever you keep your data, back up your shit.

The failure, by the way, was traced by my sysadmin to be a failure of the WordPress Automatic Update plugin that had (tangentially) created the backup in the first place. There’s no reports from other folks who have had this problem, but it seems that WPAU was deprecated when neither of us were looking and a similar function was integrated into the WP core. Yeah, but nobody mentioned that the plugin should no longer be used, so can we be blamed for missing the memo?