On November 1st, 2024, I shut down my Unraid server to install a new hard drive. Once I turned it back on again and went to the web UI to spin up the disks, I noticed that i was reading as 2 TB instead of 8 TB. So, I spun down the disks and pulled the hard drive out. I ended up not putting it back in, as when I went to check on my website, it said that there was a database error. And when I looked at my MariaDB database that WordPress uses to store everything, it wasn’t booting up. So, panicked, I decided to restart the Docker container. It wiped the whole database.
I went back to my website and it greeted me with the WordPress install screen. I just lost everything. All my posts were gone. I had to start all over again. Thankfully, I had only a few posts up, so not much was lost, but I still had to do my best to restore it. I installed a new theme, Kadence, for my website, and checked archive.org to see if it saved my website. Nope. I checked my RSS reader to make sure it saved all my posts locally. It did! I opted to just copy and paste everything from there into new posts, and I had the thumbnails saved on my computer. But this was an important lesson to always keep backups. No matter what you do, always keep backups. You might think you don’t need to keep backups because you don’t do anything risky, but keep backups anyway. You might have an external hard drive you back up your computer to, but remember the 3-2-1 backup rule to keep three backups: two onsite and one offsite. I decided to back up my MariaDB to another Docker container, my desktop PC, and Google Drive.
Thankfully, my website is just starting out and it wasn’t too critical to have everything backed up. But if you have stuff like tax information or anything business-related on your computer: Always. Keep. Backups.
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