Ooops! Sorry… Na, nothing! It never happened. Just a dream.
You might have noticed my site was not working very well during the last two days. My domain name had been suspended by my host company after a severe server load and I had to delete that database in order for my them to reactivate my domain name. It resulted the Popularity Contest plugin was responsible for this and screwed up the database. It is quite a long story but… many hours/downloads/uploads/tests/upgrades later, I could finally restore a database from my backups. It took quite a while and I am really sorry for that.
I ran into a lot of issues while exporting and importing in to phpMyAdmin. The database was large and phpMyAdmin was importing only half of it (timeout???) even though it said “Your SQL query has been executed successfully”. I retried it a few (dozen of) times. I exported it as Zip, GZip, split the sql file into 4,6,8… smaller files. Nothing worked.
And at 7:16pm… Hallelujah! it works!
You can t imagine what I was feeling at this very moment. It was like… I don t know… like finding some water after 15 days in the desert, maybe!?
So, here it is, all posts restored, just a few comments lost (no more than 5 I think), and I have upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 while I was at it.
What happened in the last two days taught me a few important things:
- 1- Upgrade WordPress and plugins to the latest release if possible
- 2- Repair/optimize database every once in a while with phpMyAdmin
- 3- The phpMyAdmin import/export Functionalities suck!
- 4- Don t count too much on your host company to support you when you are in a deep shit!
Anyway, I am still wondering what went wrong with the Popularity Contest plugin. Did anyone had a similar problem?
P.S.: I received a message on Twitter saying “… and pls backup!” Well, I backup on a current basis. Actually, once a week or so or after any big site update. I can t be held responsible when a backup get corrupted. It just happens! That s why it is really important to always have a few backups. Mines are stored on my server and on two external hard drives.
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Jhenee says:
13 Jun, 2009
Im having the same issue with you when the time that i need to revert my old database backup. I can t upload directly the database because it s to big.. luckily my hosting company was very helpful they are the one who uploaded my database. this is very scary moment when the time and without noticed that they are suspended our site due to overload used or to much database request it was happened to me to my other site when im using random query.
jamas joy says:
21 Sep, 2010
luckily my hosting company was very helpful they are the one who uploaded my database.
Zeth says:
20 Jul, 2011
Hi! Great blog. I wish I was better at PhpMyAdmin, but it seems fairly hard to grasp. I don t know. Database control is a cool thing!