The Importance of Backups
As an ex-professional geek, I am well aware of the importance of backing up one’s data, but well, you know how it is, it gets tedious so you skip it a while, and well there are bits of data in obscure locations that you forget about, then…
Then your ISP upgrades the version of PHP they are running on their servers and Suddenly! Your blog doesn’t work any more. At that point you realise you haven’t backed it up for, well, er several years. Some desperate scrabbling around ensues. Because of the nature of the error I couldn’t logon to the web dashboard for the blog, so I could only retrieve by FTP the PHP files. The database was still held in the MySQL database and I couldn’t recall the admin password and, well, my documentation left something to be desired (well I am an ex-professional geek). Some random clicking later I discovered the username/password hard coded into a PHP page and I downloaded the SQL data and the 800+ posts.
Now that I was calm, sorting the rest of the problem with the blog was straightforward. Read The Flaming Message. the error message suggested that a WordPress plugin (WordPress Automatic Upgrade) could no longer access a temporary folder. I looked. the folder was no-where to be seen. Created it, and Presto! Blog works.
Login to the dashboard and Job #1, create an automatic weekly backup and have it emailed to me.
And relax. Open a beer, and watch “Gardener’s World”.
I’ll work out why the Gravatar plugin is only showing the default avatars later.
...ravings from the Shell... 