The Mystic Bird

Seems an odd way to title a post but the two had a lot in common when it came to me saving what all I could from the clutches of a database failure on Merlin’s Minute (dot com). Allow me to explain further.

I had been having backups emailed to me from the server via a cron and script. These DB backups were then saved by yet another function available in Ubuntu Linux which in turn were picked up and saved to a seperate hard drive courtesy of the Simple Backup Config application I have on my install of Ubuntu. This was available on Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) as well via the repositories.

Well for some reason that I’m still looking into, the database on merlinsminute.com that ran things for the blog crashed. Once I found out, I used a backup copy to overwrite with but this didn’t work very well as many pieces and parts were missing. Some of which was the connection to Wordpress.com that was needed to keep things like the Stats plugin working and synced up.

After some harried scenarios were tossed around, I decided to copy the exported XML file that contained all my data into a new Wordpress installation I named The Mystic Bird.Wordpress.com. After that, I set a redirect from merlinsminute.com to the new account so I could at least try to keep folks informed. Now I could relax some and decide what to do next.

The decision I made was to begin anew and attempt to salvage what I could. Merlins Minute was dead and nothing I could do would save it. The connection to Wordpress was lost, the Stats plugin refused to work without it, and for some reason the database still acted buggy as hell even though it was reinstated with a backed up copy.

The Mystic Bird.com/ablog was brought to life to take over and carry on. Suffice it to say that both cPanel and Ubuntu saved my bacon when it came time to use the backups I was saving for that “just in case” scenario. Thankfully, I tossed Windows off this desktop when I installed 8.04 and have the 2nd drive as a backup.

It’s going to take some time to finish picking all the pieces up and mend things back together again but I’ll get it done. Thanks to Ubuntu and some clever people who write code all day, I can keep going.