Rescued from the Bitbucket
This hasn’t been the longest period of silence in the history of It Could Be Worse, but I had a valid excuse this time.
While upgrading us to ADSL, Plusnet deleted my blog, photo gallery and database. They restored the sites, but the database was lost.
I got most of the anger out of my system using Plusnet’s tech-support facility and discussion forum (a note if anyone from PN is reading: I’m sorry if I came across as a bit of a prat — I was very annoyed). Once I was told that the database couldn’t be restored, I set about formulating a plan for rescuing the blog. Fortunately, when I had to force the issue last time (after Berkeley DB was found to be incompatible on a new server) I made a plain-text export of the blog entries and comments, which was reasonably up-to-date: it contained all but the last nine or so entries.
So, with a new blog in place, I imported from this dump file, and copied and pasted the other entries back in, setting the dates retrospectively.
I’ve learned a lesson: you can’t rely on people not to do stupid things, like (a) deleting databases and (b) having no backup, so I’m going to implement a backup strategy, using mysqldump and a perl script.