Sorry for the down time folks!

Posted on September 29, 2010 by knittingpatterns4you | 0 Comments

If you tried to visit my site sometime in the last 24 to 48 hours or so you may have been greeted by a "error establishing database connection" message instead of the content you were looking for. What happened is that I requested an upgrade from my host, which required them migrating my databases to a new location. I pointed the site to that new location but somehow the database refused me access and therefore the site stopped working.

I spent an hour and a half on the phone with them, during which they initially kept insisting that I must have a typo somewhere and then finally admitted there was a mysterious DB problem that they had to investigate. After that wonderful conversation I decided there was no way I could wait for them to fix the problem and went ahead and created a new database, then restored that new DB with the backup from the REAL database, then pointed the site to the new one instead. Which obviously works since you're able to read this right now! Then after I got home I went and did the same thing for the other 5 or so sites that were affected.

Moral of the story? Make sure you back things up! Especially if you're about to make a major change to something, and especially especially if you're requesting that someone else make that major change. I ran backups of all my databases right before I put in the request for the upgrade and it's a good thing I did because otherwise I'd be manually restoring my content from old backups and Google caches . . . not fun.

Speaking of which, the only site that I wasn't able to restore this way is the latest one, Knitspiring. Something went wrong with that DB backup and I have literally lost all the content. It's sort of ironic that this happened to the newest and therefore most updated of my blogs, but on the bright side, that means it had the least amount of content in it! I'm going to restore the content from Google cache and the site should be back up by this evening.

Bet most of you reading this are thinking you're happy you don't do this sort of work for a living . . . ;o)

Posted in Housekeeping


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