My Goof of the Day and a Big Blog Upgrade Tip
I just majorly goofed on my blog. While upgrading a bunch of blogs to Wordpress 2.2 I overwrote my theme before checking my backup. It seems my FTP had not managed to transfer my sidebar so when I had a look at my handy work I had the default staring back at me.
- Don’t do upgrades in a rush, take your time
- Always take regular backups, not just when you are upgrading
- Check your backups before making big changes
- Rename any themes you customise so you are using a completely unique name to prevent overwrites
- Use Subversion or some other version control system if you have it so you can roll back changes
Seems I have things pretty much back to normal. That could have been nasty! 
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By Chris Garrett. Posted in Development
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Another big one for me: read the instructions. Upgrading to the last couple of versions of WordPress should have involved deativating plugins before starting. I say “should have” because I discovered that bit of information after I had uploaded the new version. It was a bit of work to clean up that mess.
One Great thing about version 2.2 is that there now is a feature all the way down your plugins screen to “Deactivate all Plugins” in one click… but thats from 2.2 up…would be better in the top right corner
but still saves a lot of frustration.
Reactivation is of course one at the time.
I’ve been stalling on the 2.2 upgrade for my blogs on WP, living in fear of this very sort of thing… Your goof is, paradoxically, almost reassuring!
In my day job I’m part of the Disaster Recovery (DR) Team. We are a group of IT guys that will go to a remote site to restore business critical systems in the event of a disaster. When your company loses millions a day if our systems were down you can understand having a DR plan and we test it every year for 2 days at the remote site.
Having good backups and a recovery plan is something we never think about for our personal computers. But at a minimum we should at least burn important data to cd or dvd or even USB memory sticks.
Because it doesn’t matter whether there was a huge natural disaster or you spilled your double non-fat mocha latte with whipped cream on your home pc. It can still be a disaster if you loose important information.
Don’t you hate that sinking feeling right after you hit the enter button? That, “I knew I should have backed this up before I did anything.”
Well at least it is not all lost. Just time and frustration.
Cheers and better luck this week.
@Jen: I had been doing the same thing, for similar reasons. I finally got around to it about a week ago, and things went relatively smooth (though, like Chris, it didn’t go perfectly).
@Chris: You can do one fullproof method. Whenever you are ready to upgrade ask your host to take a complete cpanel backup. So if anything goes wrong your complete setup will be back in 5 min max.
I realized the power of cpanel backup lately when i changed my host. they just used my old hosting cpanel backup to create one theirs.
I just changed my theme and then sat there scratching my head for a while because some of my plugins didn’t seem to be working. It took a while before I realised that they made changes to the page.php and single.php files so another thing to remember is that when changing themes that you need to make sure that any plugins that change the cosmetics of your site still work!
When I moved to another hosting company, I did it so “wisely” that I was never able to get my blog look like it did before. Since then, I’m afraid to do upgrades. This is the first time I hear about Subversion – I’m going to see what it is about. Thank you for the useful information.
Hey Chris, I upgraded 2 WP blogs in about 20 seconds with no mess ups. I used the script from the code cave, this is the link http://www.thecodecave.com/article418
It is a killer script. Only minor downer is that it runs on *nix (shell script) so I doubt you could get it to run on Windows very easily.
Oh, and the script handles templates perfectly too.
@Ian – Heh I have been humbled by instructions a couple of times too
@Hummerbie – Cool
@Jen – Glad my goof is reassuring
@Steve – Have you been spying on me? There is a real risk of latte damage around here
@Roger – Unfortunately the sinking feeling is quite a common one with me
@Adam – Good to know it worked for you even if not entirely smooth
@Ashish – Good tip!
@Mike – Yeah my templates are hacked up quite a bit, that combined with plugin versioning can get .. interesting
@Simonne – Definitely definitely look into subversion if you do *any* development work, enter svn on the ssh command line to see if your host has it on there for you
@Jack – Will check it out, thanks