A bit of disaster recovery

Some of my web sites, includ­ing billso.com and billso.info, were down between 4 and 8 March 2009. Dreamhost moved my account to a new and faster server — but for­got to tell me about the move. When I checked my sites, I got error messages.

Dreamhost sup­port admit­ted that they should have given my 72 hours prior notice, so I’d have time to do a com­plete backup and check­out on my sites. With some lead time, I prob­a­bly could have had every­thing restored within an hour of the server migra­tion. I love DH, so I’m not going to fault them because part of the prob­lem is my own frack­ing fault.

I use a Word­Press plu­gin called Word­Press Data­base Backup to run a daily backup of each site’s MySQL tables, which hold the arti­cles, pages and data for each site. With­out those tables, there’s no blog.

When I restored billso.com, the entire site came back online — except for one fea­ture. The RSS feed on billso.com wasn’t resolv­ing at all. I checked Google for some tips, edited a cou­ple of Word­Press files and restored the RSS service.

I also dis­cov­ered dur­ing the data­base restora­tion process that I hadn’t backed up all of the tables for one of the blogs. Word­Press plu­g­ins some­times set up their own tables to record infor­ma­tion on posts, pages or users. On that one blog, I failed to include three tables in the sched­uled daily backup.

I will restore billso.info this week­end. That server is an exper­i­men­tal lifestream which should aggre­gate my activ­i­ties on sev­eral dif­fer­ent ser­vices, includ­ing Twit­ter and FriendFeed.

Tagged as: backup, blog, blogging, disaster, dreamhost, DRP, MySQL, WordPress