Speaking of backups…

Wow, that was close. I checked my blog this morning and for some reason everything after the "Continued..." link on my last post, The melody of life, was gone! I mean, it wasn't even in the database! I thought maybe it had something to do with the quotes in the comments for that post, but I tried creating a test post and posting comments with quotes, and nothing happen!

Hmm... that was scary. I thought I had totally lost the entire post. I usually don't save copies of my posts anywhere else, so I panicked when even the database lost the post information. I tried downloading a backup of the database, but that only generated a backup for the current database content, which did not include the entire missing post!

My next thought was to see if I could some how get a cached version of the post from my browser. As I Googled for Firefox's cache location, I prayed that I did not turn off caching on my browser. I browsed to the following directory:

C:Documents and Settings*your username*Local SettingsApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles*your profile*Cache

I then sorted all the files by date. I knew I had looked at that post yesterday, so I scrolled to all the files for yesterday's date. I then opened Notepad (actually, I used gVIM, but Notepad works) and dragged each file into Notepad looking for the page that contained that post. Finally I found it, copied it to my Desktop, added a .htm extension, opened the file in Dreamweaver, and then copied the entire post from that file and recreated the post on my blog.

In that post I spoke about how I always backup my MP3s. Well, now I'm going to always backup my blog database! I think I'll write a cron job to email a daily gzip backup of the database to myself every night.

EDIT: I just realized that I keep an RSS feed of all my posts in my email client (Thunderbird), so I could have just opened the RSS article for the post that was messed up and I would have had the entire contents of the post. I guess those RSS feeds really are useful!