Saturday, April 19th, 2014
I managed to migrate several websites to a new host — but I forgot my “Fiddling Around” blog. I thought I had migrated it, because I had it in a separate WordPress installation on my main website, which I had backed up separately. When I migrated the main site, I saw the link to my blog, but I didn’t actually check it to make sure it worked. DOH!
Much later, I got a report of a broken link to my blog in another site. When I investigated it, I found that the restore of the main site did not restore the database of the blog (the database is probably the only really important part of a WordPress blog — everything else can be restored relatively easily).
I dimly remembered making a separate backup of the blog, just in case the full backup of the main site had a problem, but I could not find that backup.
After a couple of hours of fretting, I gave up, thinking that I had just lost the blog. Forever.
Then about 5am this morning, I awoke with a start. I remembered that I had moved a bunch of my website stuff to a large USB drive because I was running out of room on my main PC drive. I check that drive, and sure enough, there was the separate backup!
Instead of restoring it as a separate WordPress installation on the main site, which I didn’t know for sure would even work, I decided to install it on a separate domain. That did work.
I am considering moving the blog (by hand, over time) to my this site, but for now, I’m happy that I did not lose it. I have updated all the plugins (and removed some that I don’t want anymore), and applied the new 3.9 WordPress update. Oh, and I backed the site up again.
I can now worry about something else.