Oddity 59 blog.
When I woke up the other morning my blog was gone. Oh, not this one, thank goodness, but rather Oddity59.
That’s my personal blog where I write things that I suspect may not interest this blog’s audience.
I keep photos there too, of the dogs and cats and random sights.
I was quite mystified that it was gone — I hadn’t done anything to it. The files were still there — I used my FTP software to check.
Poof! Database be gone!1
It was the database that had done a bunk, or so the error message that greeted me claimed: There are no databases associated with your account.
Unfortunately I was a little unwell that day and didn’t think to take a screenshot.
I visited the site’s Control Panel and sure enough, where there had been a database on the previous day, suddenly there was none.
How to backup your WordPress website.
I was puzzled, but not worried. For one thing, I didn’t invest a lot of energy into that blog — I simply added occasional casually written posts on random topics. For another I had excellent backups. [If you want excellent backups too, see my ebook: How to backup your WordPress website.]
After hunting round a bit and checking in with some colleagues I logged a support ticket with the host, Techark. They were unable to explain why the database had disappeared, but were able to restore it from their backup. That was easier for me than my setting up the database again and importing my backups.
Broken photos
The photos just do not work.
Unfortunately the associated photo albums, running on the Gallery 2 software didn’t come back quite the same. The files are there, and I reinstalled Gallery 2, but things just don’t work.
A decision to close the blog
Funnily enough, just that morning I’d been considering possibly closing the Oddity 59 blog and just incorporating the posts and photos with this one. This strange and bizarre occurrence made the decision easier.
New old posts on this blog
From now on I’ll be adding those ‘more off-topic’ posts to this blog after all. They are few and far between, and sometimes I wasn’t sure which blog to add specific posts to anyway.
I’m still thinking about what to do with the photos. I may pick up my dormant Flickr account or I may use the excellent photo gallery feature now included in WordPress to add the photos here. [See Make a WordPress image Gallery .]
I’ll also gradually bring in the older posts from Oddity 59 and add them here, with their original date. They may or may not show up in the RSS feed.
If you have any thoughts on all this I’d be glad to hear them. Add them to the comments below.
1 When I told my partner the database had disappeared she was totally unsurprised. It turns out such things are her normal expectation for what happens around computers and computer systems. She expects computers to go down, data to just disappear, files to be lost. She said she expects things to just go poof!
. I think that’s what comes from working in large institutions (and using Windows).
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I had a similar problem a while back when my hockey club’s site http://dunedinicehockey.co.nz/ got hacked. It became a perfect opportunity to just rebuild it from scratch, which I’d been planning to do for a while anyway, but never got around to.
Turning a problem into a positive is always a good thing
Sorry to hear about the hacking.
But, yes. If you’re going to spend a bunch of time / money / energy fixing something that broke then it’s a great time to re-evaluate what you’ve got and what you can do with it.
The site looks great. How do you find the NextGen Gallery?
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