WordPress Recovery

Well, I have the basics of my blog recovered now, so almost all of my posts going back several years are once again available.

In my last post titled Lesson Re-learned: Backups !, I admitted that I had committed the cardinal sin of making changes to my web site without doing a backup first (walking the tightrope without a net).

Luckily for me I had installed the WP Super Cache plugin, so all of my content actually still existed as static files, and being a bit of a hacker, I was able to throw together some code to effectively recover my posts.

Lesson Re-learned: Backups !

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="239"] Homer Simpson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

I just shot my blog in the foot, or more accurately, I didn't follow IT 101 and back things up before making a change.

I had moved my site to be completely WordPress based a while ago, and as a result I had a bit of a convoluted setup on my server.

When I first set up my WordPress blog it was as a sub-domain of accuweaver.com, and was housed at http://wordpress.accuweaver.com/ (also aliased to http://blog.accuweaver.com/). The http://www.accuweaver.com/ site just static pages that hadn't changed for years.

So when I finally got my blog set up to host the few static pages I had, I just changed the directory on my server to have a symbolic link to the directory where wordpress.accuweaver.com had it's content:

1. Removed the directory httpdocs from /var/www/vhosts/accuweaver.com


2. Added a link in that folder to /var/www/vhosts/accuweaver.com/subdomains/wordpress/httpdocs.

This actually worked really well, since the content was only in one place, and all I had to do was change the host name in WordPress.