So, I was futzing around with the site today and wanted to try out a forum plug-in and a poll plug-in. Forgot to back up beforehand.

Didn't like them, removed them. Then this evening went in to do my manual biweekly backup (I created the database outside of the cPanel structure long ago, so cPanel doesn't include it in the nightly backup), saw some tables related to the poll plugin, marked them, then hit the "drop" command.

Only I hit the one to drop the whole database, not just the marked tables. Clicked yes to the "are you sure" warning, because I thought it was just dropping those tables, then found out I'd dropped the whole database.

MySQL apparently doesn't have a "holy crap" button to immediately undo disastrous mistakes, and in all this time, really doesn't have a method to undo a database drop. You might possibly reconstruct it, but in general you're stuck restoring the database from backups.

Luckily I back up regularly, because I'm relatively paranoid. I lost a few edits to later chapters in the novels. More saddening is that I lost a number of comments posted in the last few days by friends and new readers including a discussion on the use of racially charged language in the early chapters.

So, for those of you who manage your own server... back up, back up, back up, and pay attention to those warning messages. We've gotten so used to them we mindlessly click. But if I'd read the warning message, I'd have known that I was about to kill much more data than I thought and could have stopped before it was too late.

And to those of you who posted comments in the last few days... SOOOORRRRYYYY! Won't happen again.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 12:59 am and is filed under Hell on $5, Web Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.