lessons learnt the hard way

Yesterday I learnt some very important lessons, all learnt through a rather painful process.

1. When you uninstall software, you should make sure you’ve chosen the right instance. Even if the different instances are installed on different domains.
2. Don’t mess around with important stuff when you’re tired and unwell.
3. Taking regular backups may be a boring administrative task, but it’s worth the effort.
4. Taking backups before making changes to software is not an optional task.

You might have noticed this site was down for most of yesterday and this morning. That’s because I thought it was time to uninstall my test instance of WordPress. So off I went and did just that. Only, I managed to uninstall (and delete the database for) the instance of WordPress that runs this blog. I didn’t realise til hours later, by which time, my hosting provider had run that day’s backup, thereby backing up big fat nothing and deleting the previous day’s backup. Awesome!

Just as I thought I was going to have to reenter all of my posts, my provider turned up a back up from 26 June. That means I lost any comments made in the last three days, but that’s a lot better than years worth of my blog. *Phew*

So I’m off to by an external hard drive, on which I intend to back up my life (because, you guessed it – not only do I not back up my website, but I also don’t have a back up of my research or teaching files, my music, or my photos).