You would think it is an unspoken rule in blogging, to always keep an up-to-date backup of your content – whether it’s your blog posts, CSS edits, or even just Instagram snaps. Especially before and after doing something, like say, updating your site, right? It’s not especially hard to do, with all of the cloud syncing functionality that’s available.
You would think.
I’m one of those last minute bloggers. I usually write my post directly in WordPress and nine times out of ten, it goes live immediately (or is backdated 10 minutes because I missed my self-imposed deadline).
I’ll admit, life has been pretty hectic the past few months. I’ve changed jobs, got engaged, got married, lost 20 pounds, and that’s just to name a few. So when I finally decided to come back from my blogging hiatus, the site had been long overdue for a few software updates.
“Oh, that shouldn’t take too long. I’ll start that while I finish up the bevy of half-written posts sitting in my drafts…”
Famous last words thoughts.
One unfortunate update sans backup later, my site crashed. It wouldn’t even load the backend of the WordPress dashboard. I had to log into my web host and restore from a previous backup. Oh, and that backup was from March.
Six months worth of code edits, content that was still bringing in traffic despite my not having updated with any new recent posts, and plugin configurations. Gone. I was pretty disappointed in myself. I had no other copies of my posts saved on my local hard drive. While they were tiny edits over a timespan of months – to try and rectify it during a few free hours ramping up to the holidays was another thing entirely.
I’ll do my best to keep updating regularly (and backing up these updates) in the next coming weeks, but you may not see me updating as much as I did pre-hiatus. I am fairly good at updating my Instagram though, so if you’re more inclined to daily updates you can find me over at OuiEmmy.
