Daily DB Backups FTW!!

I did something stupid last night: I deleted this blog.

Yes. I DELETED it.

Last night, I was cleaning out my various test installs on my cPanel – you know, phpBB, BuddyPress, bbPress & a few of my own pathetic attempts at LAMP coding. While trying to delete one of those DBs, I accidentally deleted the MySQL DB that handles THIS blog. The worst part is I didn’t realize what I’d done until this morning when the blog showed a “500 Internal Server Error”.

My heart sank.

And then I remembered that I had installed the WP-DB-Backup plugin. I was taking daily backups & emailing it to myself! FTW! The rest of the process was pretty simple:

1. Create a new database with the same name as in your wp-config.php file.
2. Download the latest backup file from your email inbox.
3. Go to phpMyAdmin & import the latest backup file that you just downloaded.

That’s it. The blog is now ‘back up’ online! :)

In hindsight, it probably doesn’t seem like a big deal – but it would have been a HUGE deal had I not activated the WP-DB-Backup plugin in the first place. What would have happened if I hadn’t activated the plugin & didn’t have daily backups?

shudder