Live and Learn: A Lesson In Trust

Posted by on Feb 22, 2012 @ 4:29 pm in Hiking News | 5 comments

Live and Learn: A Lesson In Trust

Those of you who are regulars here may have noticed there is a black hole of missing content from February 6th through today. Unfortunately my web host encountered a series of errors with hardware failures that made complete recovery impossible. They suffered a disk failure on the server that hosts Meanderthals and their disk array recovery mechanism did not work properly to enable data mirroring on another drive in the array.

It seems they also put too much faith in their hardware technology to consider regular backups, so the most recent backup they had for data recovery was two weeks old. I asked about incremental backups, which they apparently use, but were not available for this recovery. The technology sounds good on paper, but if you can’t use it during times of crisis, you end up with a sad situation. So here we are, back on February 6th, with a valuable lesson learned.

I have been using the BackWPup plugin for WordPress database backups just in case this very situation occurred. I take an automated backup every night that works well and only takes a few minutes. That’s the good news. When I started looking into actually using one of these backups to forward recover my WordPress data, I ran into a mish-mash of technical procedures for restoring over top of my existing installation that concerned me. I think it would work great if I were moving to a new server and wanted to restore there, but from what I could gather it doesn’t save any of the local modifications I have made to WordPress code and the theme that I am running. I’d rather not reapply all those mods.

So I made the decision to live without the content updates I have made since February 6th. The good news is I hadn’t written any major new trail reports during that period, just updates to existing reports. I can recreate those updates without much difficulty. The Hiking News section will be missing a couple dozen blog items, but that is all content that exists elsewhere on the web.

So this isn’t a major blow for Meanderthals, but one that gives me pause. I am asking for your advice for dealing with a similar situation in the future. Those of you who run WordPress blogs, how do you protect your data? If you have done a restore of your WordPress installation after a failure, how did you do it? I kinda miss the days of static HTML files when I always had a copy of my site on my PC, but that would eliminate all the terrific content management facilities inherent to WordPress.

Please use the comments feature below to share your advice and experience.

 

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  • http://gpstracklog.com/ Rich Owings

    Jeff,

    A database restoration your PHP files too? Even so, why not copy all those files now and the run the restoration?

    I backup three ways: database, XML export and  a full mirror copy of all fiels fromm the server.

    • http://gpstracklog.com/ Rich Owings

      Whoa, I’m a lousy typist. Didn’t realize I wasn’t going to get a chance to go back and edit. What I was trying to say was, doesn’t a database restoration restore your PHP files too? The one time I did it, I don’t believe I lost any customizations.

      Otherwise, you can copy the files now, run the database restoration and then FTP the files back to the server.

      • http://internetbrothers.org/ Jeff Clark, Meanderthals

        Hi Rich. Thanks for chiming in. What tools do you use to do the database, XML export and full image copy backups? Have you done restores with each of these methods? What were your procedures? 

        • http://gpstracklog.com/ Rich Owings

          Jeff, I’m using Lester Chan’s WP-DBManager plugin and yes, I have restored using it (but only once). 

          WP recommends copying all server files prior to updates and I do that using the Filezilla FTP client. I haven’t had to use it to restore things, but I believe it would solve your issue of having lost PHP file/theme changes. This is the only one of the tools that is really time-consuming, but it’s probably good to do once a month or so. Another good practice is to make a copy of any PHP files anytime you make a change.

          You can use Tools > Export to generate an XML export. This is what people use to move their site from one host to another. I don’t know that it’s a good restoration tool otherwise, but if you lost a few posts, you could easily reconstruct them from it.Are you in Asheville? I’d be glad to get together sometime and discuss WP, etc. over a beer or coffee.

  • http://internetbrothers.org/ Jeff Clark, Meanderthals

    Rich, thank you for all your suggestions. At the least I am going to start FTPing everything to my PC on a regular basis. At present the database is 850 meg in size. That will only get bigger over time, so I suspect it will take hours to do. Not to mention the bandwidth.

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