Website Mishap
Hi everyone,
I don’t know what happened but when it was time for me to post this week’s edition of the Carnival, I kept getting an error message from the server when I wanted to check the post to see if everything was ok. It kept telling me that the page didn’t exist.
A phone call (to my hosting company) later, and I’m told that my website’s database is blank! The contents of the website are nowhere to be found. No need to say that I am not happy and give an earful to the rep that was on the line with me.
To make a long story short, I have to shell out $15 for them to restore my website from the backups they make every Sunday. The problem is that I only found out about this on Monday and nobody can tell me if it happened before that day. If it did, then I’m royally screwed and I will have to start back from scratch.
To everyone who has been posting on a regular basis on Rich Life Carnival, I am really really sorry about this. I plan on keeping the carnival running, but this is certainly something that I wouldn’t want to see happening on any of my other sites.
I know I’m partly to blame for not having a backup of the site, but then again I have A LOT of sites, and keeping track of all of them to do backups would be a veritable nightmare. Does anyone have any suggestions for software that could do this automatically?
Also, since I’ve been handed a blank slate, I’m probably going to burn another Feedburner feed for my subscriber, since I’m not positive the former one will keep on working. Gosh, what a nightmare! Please forgive the current appearance of the website, I will be cleaning things up soon, it’s just that every time I come here I feel so discouraged I can’t bring myself to actually work on it.
Anyway, I just wanted to give a heads up to everyone who’s been checking out the site to see if the new edition was up. I am going to take the opportunity to make a few design changes, and hopefully this doesn’t happen again.
Thanks again to everybody who has been a contributor to the Rich Life Carnival
What a royal pain! There are some webhosts that will back up everything you have with one click, but this option is usually only available on a VPS or dedicated server. Still, it might be worth looking into.
Another option is using the WordPress Database Backup. You can set it to automatically e-mail you a zipped copy of your database. I have it send me a daily backup for my main site, and a weekly backup for my sites that have fewer updates (I can recover any articles it misses via a feedreader if necessary). I have the files sent to my Gmail account where it is automatically tagged and archived.
Just be sure to test it out to make sure the backup works properly. Good luck!
Comment by Patrick — April 7, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
Thanks for the pointers!
I’ve been able to get my hands on most of the cached versions of the carnival, I’m posting them back, although I’m not totally sure I’ll find them all… If I do, great, if I don’t, I’ll have done the best I could
Comment by admin — April 7, 2009 @ 4:07 pm