I Almost Deleted My Blog!

Last week gave me quite a scare.

I was just tinkering about my blog last week and decided to move some files via FTP to my webhost. I no longer host my beauty blog on Blogger, and have moved to a separate webhost instead and migrated to Wordpress. With my own webhost, I could essentially host my other blogs on it too, without having to purchase a new one.

Anyway, so there I was, transferring some files on my FTP client, FileZilla, and I have absolutely no idea what happened next, or how it even happened, but I accidentally deleted my public_html folder. This folder had my beauty blog files in it, and the next thing you know, I could access my blog no longer.

I had, somehow, manage to delete my blog.

I felt as though my entire stomach and heart were ripped out of me. I had a panic attack. I did not just delete over a year's work, did I?!

I immediately shot an email to my blogging guru and saviour, Edrei, who then reassured me that as long as my mySQL database was intact, my posts and comments would still remain untouched. I heaved a huge sigh of relief, because I don't know what I would do if I were to lose over a year's worth of work. Hard work too, mind you.

Thank God, I had a backup of my blog files somewhere in my computer. I had the files stored away in my computer just before upgrading to Wordpress 2.7. Essentially, I only lost a month's worth of changes I made to the settings and plugins of the blog. As all my photographs were hosted on Photobucket, I didn't lose any of the pictures used in my posts.

After an hour of transferring the files back to the server via FTP, and adding the changes, my blog was finally back to normal. My heart and stomach slowly crawled their way back into my body.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. Back up your work, and back up often. Also, do not put all your eggs into one basket. Keep your files in separate servers if possible. If I were to put all of my photographs in the public_html folder, I would have lost ALL of them if I hadn't backed them up. Also, retrieving lost files from your webhost could be very expensive. I contacted Lunarpages (my webhost) if they could retrieve a backup of my files. They replied that files retrieval would cost me US$75. Oh boy.

So back up, back up, BACK UP. Whether it's your work, your blog, etc. Anything you put a lot of hard work and effort in deserves at least that bit of security measure.