fractalnavel

aww, that's too bad.  we recently moved all this stuff over to a new server (10/18), then tested it out for a couple of weeks before rebuilding the old server.  everything seemed to be going fine until the rebuild, then zap!, there goes the weblog. 

i had noticed it last night, and still happened to have the home page up, so i saved it to a file, in case the database was corrupted or what have you.  good thing too, as the browser shortly crashed here too, losing whatever was in memory.

turns out what i thought had happened had happened: we forgot to change the settings to point to the database on the new server.  so when the old one went pfft!, so did the blog ;-)

i can smile a bit about it now since i had taken that precaution above, and i haven't been posting much lately and so didn't lose too much.  the casualties:

• my post summaries, which appear on the archive and post category lists; i tried to fill them in with somehting reasonable, which isn't too hard, since this is the one place i try to be briefly descriptive rather than “clever”;
• five comments were lost, but at least three of these were very short.  no way of that i know to recover these;
• a record of post / website hits and referers for the last couple weeks, not that this is critical.  it could be rebuilt laboriously from the server logs, but there's no point;

anyway, there's a lesson to be learned here - more than one:

• test the new server with the old one disconnected first, before wiping any information.  so our “test” was invalidated, since the old one was online all that time.
• be more complete in documenting configurations.  but we were really pretty thorough about this, so i can't complain here.
• take a final image / backup(s) of the old server immediately before any rebuild.  this would have mitigated the problem that did occur.
• personally, maybe i should have taken more responsibility to check on things.  then again, i wanted to stay out of craig's hair, this stuff can be enough of a pain in the ass without someone second guessing you.

good enough, though.  now, to go rattle craig's cage about it ;-)  and document what was missed.