Yes, it’s true. I done goofed. I had to rollback my dearly admired website to a May 2024 backup file because things happened, and that’s the way it is. The good news is I learned a good but hard lesson about what database files really are and why sometimes details matter, I guess.
I won’t dwell on those details, but let’s just say when I decided that it was no biggie that my primary backup method for this server kind of stopped working after May 2024, I probably could have thought, “hey, maybe while this isn’t working, I can at least back up my website the ‘totally normal and official’ way by simply downloading the WordPress export file once in a while.” But that thought did not occur to me, nor did the thought that, while I was attempting to recover my server from a system-ain’t-booting condition a couple weeks ago, I could maybe do a tiny bit of research on how the WordPress database worked before I decided to make a copy of my system and overwrite the original system files because I was, idk, being frugal with my memory devices or whatever. I probably would have learned that database files sometimes aren’t copied when you run a simple copy files command, so yeah. That happened.
In a nutshell, I thought I backed things up, but I didn’t actually copy any of my WordPress database files, so those were overwritten when I decided to reuse the media that that system originally existed on, because, you know, I was being frugal or whatever. I later learned how I could have backed up those files, but alas, it was too late. I also later learned that I could have left my original (non-starting) system media alone in case I later figured out a better way to recover the original files, but you know, things happen, and I was being frugal or whatever with my memory devices.
In summary, sometimes it helps to type out your thoughts so you kind of remember a lesson about them, or something like that. That’s what I’m really doing here; reflecting on past decisions, and really letting them sink in. I guess I am dwelling on details after all though. It’s just a few months of posts lost during a time when I wasn’t posting much anyway, and the posts I did post are pretty easy to recreate.
Plus, in conclusion, I learned some stuff along the way. WordPress sites are really easy to backup, actually. It’s ok if I don’t have a backup of a full system if I have all the “important” stuff backed up too. I was able to keep all my content, which is nice; just not the stuff that was kept in the WordPress database files. It should be pretty easy, if time-consuming, to get things back to the way things were.
TL;DR: Data loss bad, learning stuff good, usually.