Thankful for Backups

For all you folks in the States this Thanksgiving, I’d like to say that I’m thankful for…backups.

I don’t know what happened yesterday, but I was having a problem with the MySQL server. It appeared to be taking up way too much RAM, and that was causing problems with some sites on the server. So I restarted the server, only that didn’t fix the problem. Now, the MySQL server didn’t appear to be running at all.

During my testing of this, I went to this page and got a Wordpress error stating that I didn’t have the script installed properly (because it couldn’t find the database). So, I clicked the install link provided thinking that I’d just fill in some info and be up and running again.

Well, that didn’t work. It messed up lots of things. So, after I got the MySQL server up and running again, I had to restore a backup that I had from early in the morning. Luckily, no actual data was lost in the process.

For those of you who don’t do backups, it’s just a matter of time before you have problems.