When Bad Things Happen

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This has nothing to do with writing or the business of writing. It’s a cautionary tale about the joys and sorrows of technology as it relates to this author’s website.

Last night, I did something really stupid that resulted in me wiping out my WordPress database. For those authors out there who use WordPress, I know you are screaming in horror—or at least your palms are sweaty. I won’t go into what I did. This was not a crash, I wasn’t hacked, and a meteor didn’t strike my provider’s data center. No, it was just plain ol’ stupidity on my part. For the next several hours, I basically lived Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief. Here is my report.

Denial

I didn’t just press that button. No, I was just checking something in the admin console. Nothing happened. I’m fine, really.

Anger

Son of a— I can’t believe I did that! And who is the idiot who designed that console to make it easy for people like me to wield so much power? I should sue—yeah, that’s it—I’ll sue my provider!

Bargaining

Please let there be a way for me to get everything back. I promise I’ll lay off the Mike and Ikes. I won’t use the far entrance at Vons because the homeless guy hangs out at the other one. I’ll be good!

Depression

I’m screwed. Might as well put away my novel, donate my laptop to Goodwill and dig a hole to live in. I wonder if Wal-Mart is hiring.

Acceptance

Okay, I know what I did, now how do I fix it?

This is actually the best place to be. Finally I took a deep breath and realized that I actually had options. For one, I create nightly backups of my database. All I had to do was to get back into the console and restore the database.

Bad news. The SQL file was too large and the restore kept timing out. Now what? Fortunately, my provider also creates nightly backups that sit on the server. That’s good news. But it costs $150 to restore the database.

What did I opt for? I paid the money, of course. That was an expensive lesson but guess what—I won’t ever make that mistake again. And once my site was restored, I used the console to create a database backup on the server, where it can actually be restored without me paying another $150.

Why tell you all this? Because bad things will happen, and when they do it does absolutely no good to panic. You have to look at your options and go through them one at a time till something works. Of course, there’s still a bit of bad news. Though my site is back up, there are reader comments missing from my last post—wonderful comments that cannot be retrieved.

All in all, a small price to pay. Things could have been a lot worse—in fact, I don’t even want to think about how bad this situation might have been. For all you other writers out there, be careful with that WordPress database. And for pity’s sake, back it up on the server! Consider this your final warning.

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