A Moment Of Regret

Quite a vague title for a blog post, I know.  Some of you are probably thinking, "What happened?  What did you do?".  I was thinking the same thing recently and am still kicking myself a bit.

I have a VPS(Virtual Private Server) that I have rented online for the last couple of years.  Its mostly a playground where I can do development for projects.  I have had a yearning to get a website up on it and maybe advertise my coding services, but with everything that's going on (especially as of late), I just haven't had the time to do that.

Anyway, I digress from my point.  I run Ubuntu Linux on the VPS and about 3 1/2 weeks ago I logged on to do some stuff and tried to install something through the apt package manager and was presented with some really funky errors.  Thankfully I had seen the errors but once before and they were those tell tale errors that say, "your distribution is flipping old and you need to UPGRADE!!!".  

So, I backed up my coding and my home directory and even my web directory where I kept things like my wiki, which had a TON of nice docs that I constantly referenced.  I then proceeded to attempt to upgrade my version from the command line, but was met with some other errors which puzzled me.  A bit of research on Google still had me puzzled.  Since I had to get some coding done, I decided to do a full re-install from the VPS control panel.  After it completed, I logged back in, uploaded my web directory, re-setup things like Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, etc., configuring as I went.

I got my web server working and attempted to go to my wiki as I needed to reference something and that was the moment that stopped me.  I realized that in my rush to back everything up and get things re-installed, I had backed up my wiki software yes, but COMPLETELY forgot about....... the database.   Yes, everything in my wiki was toast.....gone..... kaput!

So here is a lesson for you everyone, back EVERYTHING up and make sure to not forget your databases.  I am still getting things configured and added, but my wiki needs the most work of all.  C'est la vie!