Recent Downtime, Recovery On Track.
Feb 29, 2004 04:45 UTC, by Chris Simmons, Senior Journalist
From the will-robinson-replica department...

So... Like an idiot I overwrote the main config.php file that TBJ uses pretty much everywhere. Furthermore, I then overwrote a local backup when I tried to download it via ftp.
 
Two serious mistakes in a row, which could have been averted if I was more careful. The worst thing is, my most recent backup of the site was several months old. Strike three, and the hits keep coming.
 
So, I went to retrieve yesterday's backup, and murphy's law strikes me down! ;) Turns out the backup was made just a few minutes after I made my first mistake on the server, but BEFORE I had the sense to go retrieve it... 120 megabytes downloaded just to get back a 15 kilobyte file. Naturally my next thought was to retrieve an even earlier backup.. Heh.. seems that my webhost does incremental backups, and not static ones each day. So of course, there would be no earlier backup that contained a pure config.php file for me.. pout.
 
Heh.. When it rains it pours, right? I was now facing the monstrous task (still to be completed) of writing from scratch several hundred lines of configuration variables that I have added since my last pure copy of the file... Daunting, but not impossible.
 
Thanks to some judicious use of grep, your patience and understanding, and a few hours of testing, TBJ is now back online, I hope. ;)
 
What I need from you is to notify me of any errors you come across as you crawl the site, by emailing me directly.
 
I think the site is pretty close to how it worked before, but as I already mentioned, there were a lot of variables that the site used behind the scenes that I wrote once, and promptly put out of my mind.
 
What have I learned from this event? Backups are your friend. Truly. Not just monthly backups of *some* data.. but a complete pristine backup of the entire thing, stored off-disk/site and on a regular basis. It only takes one small series of events (or stupidity in my case. ;) to have things become very irritating, to say the least.
 
One more thing. I'd love your feedback on an idea I've had for a while... In the Archive section, would you like the ability to download a partial/complete zipfile for each month/year of the news, in printer friendly and mysql friendly format? What I imagine is a small download link for each month and also for each story, so that you can have a local copy to take with you, or backup or whatever.
 
Please let me know what you think. I know some nutters out there try to backup the entire internet, and well... I can't blame 'em for trying. ;)
 
Thank you all for being so patient and understanding as I fixed the situation. I am going to leave the "alert" warning intact for the next few days until I'm sure things are ship-shape.
 
Regards,
 
-Chris