As usual, once my excitement over the new block template format has died, I have stopped posting. It’s a wonder why I cannot be disciplined when something is just about me. You need X from me… I will move mountains to get it done. Yet if I need X from me, I do ABCDE… Of course, I am not the only one suffering from this. However, there are individuals that do not. This is merely a curiosity, why they don’t.

I am watching the new season of Dream Home Make Over show. They were renovating the house of this mother and sun. The mother said that she does cross-stitching every day. “A day without cross-stitching” I quote “is a day without sunshine”. Why can’t I say “I must draw every week, otherwise I feel like I am drowning.” ? It’s not really me not saying it, it’s more so me wanting to do it so badly yet not doing it, maybe not even being capable of doing it.

I suppose I can say I enjoy going against myself, that seems to be a consistent theme. In the spirit of gaining that discipline, I have decided to pick up where I have left off and started fixing the aesthetics of the site. Editing the featured image size, optimizing the front page, changing the header…

Then I got overconfident and started modifying the database tables using phpmyadmin. I got really annoyed seeing some development database leftovers. Dreamhost has prepared a really nice guide on how to create that development server, how to migrate, change things and then move them over. When you create a development database you also need to change where the website is pointing at, so the links instead of starting with your original domain name will have something like developer.dreamhost.com. When you migrate it back you should change those back.

I thought I followed all the steps, yet, here we were: A table full of links pointing to the development database. At first, I assumed those links (guid) were some old entries. I deleted a few and haven’t seen any changes in the website behavior which reassured me that this was the case. My next step was, then, to bulk delete those entries.

To my horror, after I deleted those entries, the website looked as if I have done no customization. I went back in time to the point where I switched to the new block template the first time. It turns out those entries were just not modified after I did the migration. I cannot tell you how heartbreaking it was. I am writing for myself in this space, but I have worked hard to learn how to make all those changes. I had put in a lot of hours to make it, only to erase all of that within mere seconds. Phpmyadmin even showed me how fast it was, took 10s to remove all those entries.

I have yet again not backed up the database before modifying it. In the history of this blog, this is probably the 3rd time… What was I thinking? If this was a job for someone else, I would have taken 2 backups before doing any such changes but when it is about myself, who cares… I want to make those modifications now, I have to do it now. Otherwise, I will lose interest and never do it. How sad…

I pulled myself together and thought about solutions. I may have saved the SQL file on the server. After I migrated the website back from the developer server, I had a copy of this database. I could restore that at least. It was better than starting from scratch. So I went in to find my credentials at Dreamhost panel. Guess what I have found there instead…

A backup of the database from 2 days ago… Oh DreamHost, I cannot express how much I love you. You have certainly saved me from me. I still had to repeat some of the changes I had made today but at least I didn’t lose my post and page entries.

So let this be a final lesson for me… Never ever get confident to the point where you make changes to a database without proper backups. (Perhaps I shouldn’t have said “final”, it’s usually followed by “final_final”, “real_final”, “last_final”….)