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I don’t know how many people were trying to get to the Japan Guy website this weekend, but if you were, I suspect you were getting some weird, incomprehensible error message. Oddly enough, so was I. I have was trying to fix an image problem, but ended up crashing my entire site instead. Umm, talk about scary. For a moment I thought I had lost half of my site. After the crash, I went for a long walk last night, worried that I’d have to try to re-do one years worth of Japan Guy stuff. The danger of losing something, really makes you appreciate having it so much more.
Eventually, I was able to figure out the problem. I’m so glad that I was able to get it together. The site should be working now and the pictures should be showing just fine. Time to get back to what I was going to do in the first place. Create some new posts. Sorry about the down-time everybody. Thank you for being so patient, everybody.
Sincerely,
Donald Ash
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If you have access the the database you should export a backup copy of your site once a month (or as often as you feel comfortable with) to a flash drive or your computer. That way to recover you just need to reinstall your site software, and then import the backup database.
You should also keep a copy of your posts on your computer (.txt file or similar), that way if you have to restore from a backup you can just “repost” the ones missing from the most recent backup.
I usually do try backup often, automatically, but for some reason I ran into a little snag when I found the backups havent’t been happening for nearly a year. I learned my lesson though. I am all backed up now, in several places, so I don’t ever run any risks. Thanks, Matt.
You can of course use WordPress’ export option to keep copies of the posts and comments but a dump of the database is the best option. I have one that runs every night that gives me a date stamped .sql file that I can just reload. You also want to, at the very least, backup your wp-config.php file as it has your database connection information in it. Keep it safe though as it lists, in clear text no less, your database password. The same script I have dump the database to the sql file also backs up the entire WordPress directory just to be extra safe. That same script also removes backups that are X days old. I’m guessing that you don’t have shell access to the server that you are hosted on but if you can, at least try to get backups of you database and your WordPress directory if at all possible, as that will make restore operations much simpler and less time consuming. 🙂