Posted in Backups, WordPress | 6 Comments
Aargh! My Backups Weren’t Working
Well, I didn’t practice what I preached, and I got burned.
I urged you to back up your site periodically. But the last time I backed up this site was in January. I did have the wp-db-backup plugin installed, and it was supposed to email me weekly backups of the database, but for some reason, it was not working, and I never noticed. I think I might have had the wrong email address in there, I’m not sure.
Anyway, somehow I lost all my posts and pages! Never mind how, I probably did something I shouldn’t – I was messing around and am not sure what I did, but I did something to the database in phpMyAdmin. (If only I had backed it up first.)
So I had to go back to January’s backup. I managed to recover my posts since January by going to Google and searching for my posts, and then copying them from google’s cache.
Unfortunately, I also lost all the comments made since January (sorry). It would be too hard to go back and re-create them all. I just don’t want you to think that I deleted all your great comments on purpose. 
I am still working on getting all my tags back. After I took the backup in January, I added tags to all my posts. Well, they are all gone now, and I have to re-do it. How stupid that I didn’t back up the site after I did all that tagging work before! Well, live and learn. At least now you know I’m not perfect. 
I just hope this little event will inspire you to do some backups.
- Pat Doyle
Hi Pat, I was adding to a post on one of my blogs today and all of the posts mysteriously disappeared too. I called HG and they said they were having server issues.
Then I called again and I was on the phone for an hour with a HG rep trying to reinstall the database. When she told me I should change my theme, I hung up.
After that my site came back. And I was able to add the last post. But now it looks like it might be down again. So it may be a HG problem. I think we only lost sites we were working on at the same time when they did something.
So it might not be something you did.
Hi Emma, That’s very interesting. So maybe it would have come back on its own. But now that I installed the backup from January, I have definitely lost everything after that. I still wish I would have backed up more often.
I hope you get your site back. I think HG is supposed to back up your account. But since I have a reseller account, I am supposed to take care of my own backups. Anyway, I have restored most of it, although I feel bad that I lost so many comments.
Thanks for telling me about this. I guess I don’t feel quite as stupid (just a little)
Why? What happened? Just relax, why not turn your attention to run your business online? Its easy. I will help you.
Hello Pat,
It’s not enough to just create a backup; you also have to check it to make sure that it’s good.
I send all of my WordPress backups to my Gmail account and set up an auto filter to route them to the trash. It’s automatically deleted after 30 days, but if I need it, I just go into the Trash and look for one.
You can also get a good feel for if your backups are “good”. Just look to see if the attachment to the email has any data. You can also open the attachment in a text editor. It has a lot of formatting (since it’s in SQL format) but you should be able to tell if it’s backing things up properly.
HTH,
Tom
That’s a good idea, Tom! I will have to do that in the future.
I am glad you are forthcoming enough to openly accept that you did mistake. It makes your readers feel more comfortable towards you & your life situations, opinions & recommendations. I appreciate it as well.