Site Downtime – FREAKED ME OUT

Last night, right after I wrote that cheerful post about all the updates, I BROKE MY WEBSITE. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know and neither does my host support team.

It was down for about 12 hours, and if you tried to visit during that time, you probably got directed to

1. My homepage with a freaked-out note from me on it.
2. My shop, for some weird reason
3. A 404 error page

I stayed up until about 1:30am last night trying to figure out what was wrong, emailing with Dreamhost support guru JJ G. When I finally went to bed, I was surprised I could sleep at all… in my brain was

1. What if it’s GONE FOREVER?!
2. No one will visit my site ever again.
3. I’ll have to start over FROM SCRATCH
4. Why do I use my website like a recipe book? I need hard copies of ALL my recipes!
5. Why didn’t I figure out how to make wordpress SQL backups earlier, and what the heck is that anyway?
6. I might not be able to finish NaBloPoMo (silly thought I know).

And then I had dreams. When I’m dreaming, 99.9% of the time, I know it’s a dream while it’s happening. In my dream, I checked my site and it was working, but since I knew it was a dream, I tried to use dream-logic to prove that because I dreamed it worked, it must be working in real life too.

I woke up and it was still down. And I didn’t even have an email from JJ G either… So I sent off a couple more emails to Dreamhost’s support, where I hooked up with Chalise. She told me my database (with all my posts and comments) was still there, and linked me to a backup tutorial.

So I downloaded phpMyAdmin and FTPed it to my server (one of the few things I know how to do). Then I logged in and made a backup of my blog’s SQL… it only took a second, so I’m really suspicious that it didn’t work, but… I tried.

Then, I figured since my database was in tact, I should just try to uplaod my latest backup of my www.joyfulabode.com file (which doesn’t include all the posts… only the wordpress “skeleton” and layout and plugins and all that). I did, overwrote all the then-current files in the folder, and guess what…

It worked.

Chalise at Dreamhost was trying to figure out my mess when I fixed it, so we’ll never know the actual cause.

All of this because I was trying to fix the “Previous Entries” link at the bottom of the page… You know what? IT CAN STAY BROKEN FOR NOW!

If you blog, take the time NOW to figure out how to back up your files, all of them, including your SQL database. I’m not going to make a tutorial or anything like that because I’m not positive I did it right, but there are lots of them if you google “WordPress backup phpMyAdmin”.

Also, it’s a good time to decide to back up your computer’s files too.  My dad uses Mozy.com and I just signed up for it today. They have a free backup system which lets you back up 2GB of files (including your SQL file for your blog. haha) online. Here’s what my dad had to say about it.

You have 30 days of backup online, so if a file goes missing or corrupt today, but you don’t notice it for a couple weeks, you can still get a copy from Mozy. Not all online backup companies do that. Also, you can set your own encryption code (many do it for you, so that means they have it, which I don’t like). Carbonite is a highly advertised service, but they don’t keep 30 days of backup, nor do they let you set the code.

Honestly, guys? My dad researches the hell out of stuff like this, so if he picked Mozy, I figure it must be pretty safe / the best. Anyway, if you want to sign up for Mozy today (remember it’s free) using my referral link, you and I will both get  an extra 521Mb of free space FOREVER. But that only works today. If you sign up tomorrow (or ever) with my referral link, we’ll both get 256Mb of free additional space.

Yeah, do it.

The last 12+ hours was REALLY scary for me.

Glad to be back online with you all.