Six weeks ago the church website (www.sptapestry.org) was going to have to migrate from a older server to a newer server on our website host. The church website had been on the old server for close to ten years. You may not have noticed but a few things have changed on the web in that time span. So I backed up my blog of nearly 15 years and started the migration process. I have been blogging since 2003. I haven’t always been consistent. Some times I have blogged daily and sometimes just monthly. Still it is something that has been important to me and therefore I backed up all my posts to keep from losing them.
Unfortunately I didn’t check the backup to make sure it was good.
It wasn’t good.
I found this out when I moved my blog to my own website instead of keeping it on the church site. I set up everything and imported the thought to be good backup file. Instead of suddenly seeing all my old blog posts on my new website what I found was an endless loop of my posts trying to send visitors back to the non-existent blog back on sptapestry.org. Some how my backup was corrupted in such a manner that the posts seemed to believe that they were actually stored on the old, non-existent website. This did two things: 1) it produce a lank blog page, and 2) it didn’t allow me to access the blog backend page and thus I couldn’t access any of my old posts.
I freaked out because my old blog had by now been wiped out by problems with the migration of the church website.
I tried several different methods of backing up the still functioning database of my now defunct blog. I reinstalled my blog three times and tried different versions of my backed up posts. Each time it either created the weird webpage loop or imported all my blog posts up to 2007. The 2007 posts were the first sign of hope.
Today I came up with the fourth version of my Plan B while I was running in the rain. i find that some of my best ideas pop into my head when I run during inclement weather. Plan B v4 involved installing a temporary wordpress blog on the church website to then import my blog backup. I figured that if my blog posts were continually trying to send everything back to www.sptapestry.org, then why not just set a temporary blog backup on www.sptapestry.org for the purpose of importing the posts, and then export from the temporary blog to a file that I could import to my new website.
As you can tell if you look further down the page Plan B v4 worked. From now on, when I do blog it will be here at www.raterrell.com. Woohoo. I guess this means I should start blogging more frequently now.
