I’m still kicking myself over a big mistake I made recently. A few months ago, I made some major changes to The Site of Requirement, my Harry Potter analysis and news site. I installed a copy of WordPress, moved all of the content into it, and reworked the design to take advantage of CSS instead of tables. After a few weeks of work, it was running smoothly again. My mistake? After finishing all of that work, I didn’t back it all up. I neglected to make a new backup over the following months as well.

Recently, the host the site is on put some new servers in place, and started migrating the sites to the new machines. I was unaware of this until the site stopped working. What I at first thought was just outdated DNS settings that needed to be updated proved to be far worse. The host had lost all of my files during the switch, as well as most of the database. The best they had was an older version of the database.

The backup I have contains the site before my move to WordPress, as well as a directory containing the WordPress installation, with about 80% of the work done. I should be able to get the site back up in a few days, but a few months of news posts will be AWOL, unfortunately.

The lesson here? Backup your website. Bad things will happen. Whether it’s accidental data loss, or some %@$&*# sabotaging your site. Be prepared. Make regular backups.

Edit: The database loss wasn’t as bad as I thought, luckily. I didn’t lose much at all. However, I still have to deal with the missing files.

Photo by Wysz