My Mountain Trail

Think, Then Act

Friday, August 14th, 2009

The picture is of a Cona vacuum brewer.  It makes very clean coffee with no filter.  The water boils up from the bottom, mixes with the coffee for a couple of minutes, then after the flame is put out the coffee is vacuumed back into the bottom pot.  Very yummy.

But that’s not what this post is about…

A month or so ago I was complaining about the slow progress on our work website.  Well, we finally went live with it right before the Jeep trip to Nevada.  It all looked good, though it really was harder to accomplish that result than we thought it should have been.

Anyway, today Bruce and I were making some small corrections to the copy on the new website.  In order to preserve our security I decided to delete the username that the web-people used to set the site up.  When I started that process, WordPress asked me if I wanted to re-attribute the pages created by that username to another username.  I said no, not realizing that almost the enire site was attributed to that username and not reassigning the attribution would result in the site being deleted.  Back in my Navy days when we needed to operate a valve we used to think about what the valve was and what the expected result of turning the valve was before we operated it.  Too bad I didn’t do that today.

Guess what?  I deleted the site with that single stroke of stupidity.  Not thinking here was very costly.  I was in shock for a moment but managed to start re-focus on recovery pretty quickly.  We didn’t have a local backup of the site — I wasn’t even sure how WordPress could be backed up, and it was suddenly too late to be making those plans.

Well, first I arranged w/ our hosting company to restore the site to yesterday’s backup.  That cost a bit of money, but much less than re-building the site.  And it would take up to five days.  Hmm, that’s still a big problem.

My next step was to figure out the best way to upload our old site (which I did have a local backup of).  I needed a way to load the site without changing the file structure and WordPress configuration too much.  I wasn’t exactly sure how the site would be restored by the hosting provider and I didn’t want to make any unnecessary changes that might hinder that process.

As I researched and planned my next steps, I found a system backup of the WordPress database.  Re-installing the database recovered all of the text and pages of the site.  Oh yeah, that’s good!  The site had only been down a couple of hours and now we were suddenly back in business.  Then I realized that almost none of the images or charts were recovered.  Oh, that’s not so good.  I spent the next three hours finding and uploading the images (most had been used by our old site too), and adjusting links where it was too hard to try to fix and upload the images. 

That got us back to about 90% of the full site loaded.  Now, when the hosting company does the full reload, it will be a much smaller, lower risk proposition.  In the interim, I will use my new knowledge to create a local backup of the site as it stands right now.  Whew, that was too close for comfort.  You can be sure I will pay much closer attention to what I am doing when working on our site.  Yep, I’ll be thinking before I push those buttons.

So, it was a tense, intense day today.  Lori and I met Dorette and Duane for dinner in MV this evening.  It was nice, and it was nice that I had recovered from the day — I even got a little run in before dinner.  So, I guess you could say today was full of living, good and bad, and now I’m we’re all one day older.  Cool.