Obi Wan after he found out I couldn't find my database.

Hey everyone. As you may have noticed we’ve had a slight glitch over the past few days.

Our OOPS! graphic won the day for us though, and it allowed me to do some much needed maintenance so not all was lost.

Just a quick update on what’s happened so far.

The Adventure Starts

At 1 AM last night (Wednesday) I was just saving my last document my wordpress suddenly cut out from underneath me and reported back with the installation screen. Being on a notoriously bad connection I’ve had problems before, but never this. I tried logging into my phpmyadmin account on our webhost and saw with my own disbelieving eyes that the database with all our info was missing. In its place was a hole of information.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if  33 million bytes suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

Obi-wan’s reaction to me telling him about my database going missing

The Hero Encounters Difficulty

Now the trouble is: I am at my parents-in-law having a blast, so I don’t really have time or to be frank bandwidth to spend here.

I get my internet from what is essentially a 1 person wireless repeater which in turn is linked to a BT hub across a busy street. Cars, vans and sometimes even lorries block the signal with a wall of steel when they come racing past or delivering something down the road. When someone down the street opens a door I get a worse signal! Needless to say I had trouble even loading a page, never mind trying to figure out what was going on with the website.

The Hapless Hero Enlists Obi-Wan

I grappled with the problem, even going as far as going across the street this morning to find out if I could access my server at home to get at the databases or get more information from the logs. I discovered quickly that the database wasn’t just dropped. I can’t create a new one with the same name.

This probably means that the actual file containing the information (in /var/mysql/  or whatever) is still there, but corrupted somehow. Unfortunately that prevents me from working so I decided to upload a backup I had lying around on my development laptop into a different database – and that’s where you are now.

I’ve contacted the hosting provider Obi-Wan for more information and a bit of help resetting the mysql database and checking the mysql file. In the mean time I’ll have to bore you another way.

The Hero Wins?

Who knows what’ll happen now. It could repeat itself, in which case the hero will have to start looking for a different hosting provider with the help of his friends Sir Pay Pal and Sir Google AdSense. In any case there’s a blog which, despite missing some articles, is pretty much the same as the old one. Now all that is left to do for the Hero is to recover Princess SQL and her droid L0G-F1L3 or wait for help from Obi-wan. Whichever one’s faster really.

To Be Continued…