The Importance Of Backing Up

Don’t you just hate it when you make significant changes to a website, then realise it’s causing a problem so remove everything you’ve just changed but inadvertently delete a lot of other content which you didn’t mean to and it results in you losing nearly a years’ worth of posts because you haven’t backed up in a while?

Yeah, me too!

But unfortunately that’s what I did last week, when I installed a new plugin that pulled in a lot of images and data pushing my site storage over it’s limit. This caused the site to crash and I was unable to log in to fix it. So accessing PHPmyadmin and deleting from the back-end was the only way to fix it. And that is where it all went wrong.

I managed to find the offending content through filtering a number of tables and went about the monotonous repetetive pressing of keys to delete it. It wasn’t until I was near the end that I realised that somehow my filtering had reset and I had been deleting content that wasn’t part of the unwanted plugin!

Bugger!

Checking the site it appeared as though I’d managed to delete everything going back to 2019! And because it had been done directly in the database table, there was no way to get it back!

A size limit on importing sql and xml backups meant I couldn’t upload what backups I did have. Fortunately, I was able to find archived content via archive.ph that brought me up to the beginning of the year, but everything from 2024 is gone. Sad face.

But I’ve learnt my lesson, as soon as I publish this post I’m doing a full backup. Twice!