Zombie

Minecraft Zombie

Minecraft Zombie

A backup saved my butt again. It is also the golden rule of computer data and programming. Save, save, save.

I was just working here on my Ramblin’ Dan (.org) blog. I contribute to it quite often as I consider it my base of operations. It’s like a personal diary. I am not sure exactly what I did wrong, I had several things on my computer desktop open at the same time. I was poking around in the website administrative back end at the theme files and also had Filezilla and Adobe Photoshop open. I was adding a couple of new pictures for the banner on the website. Those are all pictures I have personally captured. I was checking the requirement for the pixel height and width required. (1300×160)

I apparently clicked on something wrong at the wrong (or was it the right) time. A lot of what I had open went away. I think I was trying to do that. When I clicked on the URL to re-open Ramblin’ Dan, I received an Internal Server Error 500 notice!

OH! NO!!!

What have I done now?

My mind goes into a spin trying to understand that I had just lost YEARS of effort if I don’t find a way to fix this error. It’s calmer minds that find the solution. I at least knew it was something I did while messing with the website theme.

I tried several file replacements that did nothing to fix the error. Then I remembered I did a total site back up of the files and also the database about a week ago. So I made a SWAG that if I did a restore back to the server and let it replace all the files that I had saved, it would not delete the weeks work that was added since the backup. The the database should still be good.

So that is what I did. I installed over 7,000 files* from the previous backup as “replace existing”. My SWAG was that this could fix whatever file I messed up.

Yeah Boy! It worked like a perfect plan. The website booted with all the latest articles I had posted still intact. I was saved from the edge of disaster yet again.

I am going to have to stop doing these silly tricks that break my all my hard work. I am getting too old to have so much fun raising the dead… Zombies!

* Yes, typical Content Management Systems like WordPress often have this or more files.