[sound of giant exhale]
Yesterday, as I eagerly awaited NASA’s press conference confirming the existence of water on Mars, I was happily putting together a beautiful post on all the exciting things happening at NASA right now. I had pictures of the solar eclipse, the lake of methane and ethane on Titan, and the JASON project’s mapping of ocean typography. It was a great post.
And then…
crash.
No, not another earthquake. This was the quiet, innocuous sound of a database disappearing. entirely. completely. forever.
Fortunately, I had just backed things up on July 20.
Unfortunately, I had done a lot of clean up to my older posts that did not import well from iWeb. That was not saved. And the years off my life as I tried to navigate the murky self-help waters of web design, phpAdmin, MySQL, and WordPress Codex? Never again to return to me. Had I understood from the beginning that the database had died, I would have quickly reinstalled the backed up version and moved on. However, I did not know (though I do know) my way around these programs well enough to realize that was the calamity. In other words, there was a lot of chaos, but it took 24 hours for me to figure out if it was a fire, a flood, or an earthquake causing it.
The moral of this story? Backups are, of course, brilliant.
The other lesson? Google Reader is awesome. I recovered all of my lost entries except the one I had not published on NASA. When you cut and paste your feed out of Google Reader, the hyperlinks even transfer right into WordPress. Thank you, Google Reader. Thank you.
And now I need a long, stiff drink.
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