Always Back Up

To always move forward, you must always back up. Yeah, I got that.

But when you restore old backup files over perfectly good recent files, your data goes poof. Which is what happened to my blog this morning.

I upgraded my server software to the latest version of OSX, and breezed past the warning that if you use MySQL databases, you must export them before upgrading. After the upgrade finished, my blog dates were all scrambled. Apparently they’d reversed a MySQL bug that had done the same thing to me about six months ago. No big deal — I went back to the old OS, exported the databases, came back into the new OS and imported. And wiped a good database with an older backup.

But you may notice that all my old entries seem to be back. I did a Google lookup (obtainium justfred), used the cached page — taken just a few days before — and copy-pasted all the entries back in. Think one was missing. I don’t think I care.

Some of you may be saying (Nelson voice): “Ha, Ha!” Yep, some things still crap out on OSX. But remember that step where I “went back to the old OS”? I reinstalled the previous version of OSX on a spare hard drive, rebooted, exported data, rebooted, and was done. I have no idea how you’d do that on Windows or Linux. On OSX it’s relatively trivial. I might even have used my iPod as the spare hard drive if I’d needed to.

Vanilla MySQL, single command line for export and reimport. Several other databases had the same problem and all came back fine.