To Always Move Forward, You Must Always Back Up

…you must always back up. Yeah, I got that.

But then 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. So after the upgrade finished, my blog dates were all messed up. Apparently they reversed a MySQL bug that did 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 out a good database with an older backup.

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

Some of you may be saying (Nelson voice) “Ha, Ha!” Yep, some of these things still crap out on OSX. But — remember that step where I “went back to the old OS”? I just reinstalled the previous version of OSX on a spare hard drive, rebooted, exported data, rebooted, and was done. I would have no idea how to do this on Windows or Linux — on OSX it’s relatively trivial. I might even have used my iPod as a spare hard drive if I’d needed to. And it’s vanilla MySQL, so the export and reimport is a single command line for each database.