The MacDeskBlog

As you probably noticed, the server died last Wednesday. Since I was in the process of building the replacement server, I wasn’t as diligent in my backup procedures. One of the things that I was trying to do with the replacement server was upgrade MySQL because the database replication was not working from the virtual dedicated server to the new dedicated server and a database upgrade will provide more powerful replication.

Alas, the virtual dedicated server had a catastrophic failure. Core systems files vanished. The entire database vanished. Backups of the database vanished. Backup scripts vanished.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the database is the only piece that wasn’t being replicated. Copies of all of the files were already on the new dedicated server (and two other copies as well). Even the database story isn’t entirely bad. I still have the backup from the last time I manually replicated it to my development server. The bottom line is that I lost all of the database changes from early March through last week. I’m going to try to figure out which pictures I posted in that time frame and re-post them for the same days. For pictures I can’t figure out, I’ll just queue them up for the future.

The other good news is that MacDesktops is finally on the new dedicated server, and I have most of the services I need up and running on it. If you notice anything isn’t quite right, please let me know.

On the blog front, I’m pretty sure that I had 24 or 25 blog entries previously. The entire blog database was new since the backup I had, so it looked like I was going to lose the entire thing. Fortunately, I was using Feedburner to syndicate the site, and it had most of the posts cached. I was able to import 17 posts. I don’t know which posts are missing, if any. Maybe the count included posted comments which I DID lose along with the users. I probably won’t try very hard to recover the last bit that’s missing. Getting as much as I did back through Feedburner was more than I hoped for.