Have You Backed Your Files Up Lately?
It is often said that there are two kinds of computer users — those that have lost data and those that will…
Which is why it is important to have a current backup, preferably not on the same machine because the best backup won’t help if the box is dead. This backup admonition applies to you purveyors of bloggy goodness out there, too. Case in point, me.
I decided to update the software that runs Aspie Dad behind the scenes to its most current version. Which, like Red Ball Jets™, will enable me to run faster and jump higher. And be more secure against crackers, but I don’t think Red Ball Jets ever promised that.
Prior to the upgrade you are admonished to “backup your MySQL database and and any blog template files you may have altered.” Since I have been the victim of suddenly dead computers and the results of my own command line stupidity (”I thought that was the flag for confirm, not recurse and delete?”) I follow these directions and because I’m Aspie and I tend to follow rules fairly religiously unless I don’t want to, which is a whole other story, I backed up and verified everything.
Then I proceeded to shoot myself in the foot somewhere in the process of the upgrade.
I ran the upgrade script and got a ‘404 error, page not found’ and the like. WTF?!? Open the ftp client and am told something about directory trees and not being able to handle my request. After a couple of minutes of what I can only describe as bat-shit panic (complete with hand-flapping), I had an epiphany. I had a backup!
Sigh.
Things got real uneventful real fast. Log into PHP My Admin on the server to restore the databases from backup and Aspie Dad is back.
Now do the file replacements again - just not all at once - and nothing seems to happen. Which is good. Run the upgrade script and Bob’s your Uncle. Version 2.2 at your blogging service.
Take away message: “How is you latest backup?”
[update:] Thanks to MumIsThinking we now know where Bob’s your Uncle comes from. Thanks, Mum!
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May 22nd, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Thanks for two things:
1. reminding me why it’s so important to backup
2. a reason to finally find out the origins of the phrase “Bob’s your uncle” I always wondered where that came from
See http://tafkac.org/language/etymology/bobs_your_uncle.html
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:28 am
Backup?
You mean I’m actually supposed to back stuff up?
Thanks for the reminder. I’ll get around to it soon. Really I will.
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:16 am
In addition to having a separate backup computer in one’s house, it’s also a good idea to have a backup in another location. Many people and businesses lost all their data in the Hurricane Katrina flooding because they didn’t have backups of it anywhere else.
I recently built a free mirror site on Angelfire for my fanfic stories, just in case anything catastrophic happened to the computers in my house (fire, tornado, whatever). Not that the stories have any particular value, but I’d be unhappy if I lost them.
May 24th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I don’t want to sound like I’m on the payroll, but I can’t tell you how simple and secure life has become since I started using carbonite.com for my backup. You install it once and then you never think about backup again. My entire city could be taken out by an atom bomb and I’d be able to get at my data right up to the moment of the white flash from any old Internet cafe anywhere else in the world.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Sadly, Carbonite seems to be for computers using Windows only.
Those of us inhabiting other ecosystems will have to look elsewhere.