On Sunday I came very close to a disaster here on the Aperture blog. I awoke to a nice tweet from someone on my Twitter list wondering what had happened to the blog. So I went online to check and sure enough, where the homepage once was, a 404 page was coming up. What the hell? I logged into the back end and all the posts and pages were gone. Again, what the hell ?
So, long story short, the database had crashed, for some bizarre reason and the table that had contained the Posts and pages was corrupt and nothing I could do would fix it. Luckily, and it’s a sheer fluke, I had installed a plug-in ages ago to back up my database and theme to dropbox every few days. Restoring the database was a nightmare, as the database is so big now that I couldn’t restore it using the web interface and had to do it through the command line. Luckily I have some unix experience from several years of working on Silicon Graphic workstations some years ago.
Anyway, the site is back up now, and I don’t think I lost anything other than a few comments (so if your comments are missing, apologies). It has thought me a valuable lesson though. You never know what might happen to your data. I never thought I would have a problem like this with wordpress but there you go. The same could easily happen to your Aperture library (that has also happened to me!), so you should always try and have a backup of some kind.
Glad to hear that not much was lost. I can definitely attest to having good backups. Something bad somehow happened to my installation of Lion and was causing Aperture to crash and took down one of my Aperture libraries, too. Had to reinstall Lion, and no amount of Aperture repairing permissions, repairing database, or rebuilding database would bring it back from the dead. Luckily, I maintain my Aperture vaults and was able to rebuild that particular managed library in no time flat. Huzzah for backups!
One of the items I wanted to have a second look at. I described an approach in http://www.olafbathke.de/photography-blog/2010/11/an-implementation-of-an-automated-data-backup-system-under-the-mac-os-x-operating-system/ I have the impression it does not work at the moment, but I have not investigated yet. I want to have a look at the options Aperture provides. But I must say, I like the mentioned approach above. It is based on the file system, I am able to copy libraries and raw files structure via command line easily.
Can you shed light on the name of the plugin you use for the database/theme backups to Dropbox? I’d love to implement that for a few client sites, but all the plugins Ive seen so far just want to send the backup file to an email address.
Thanks.