Personal hell - site problems and auto-backups
by Sapphire (August 8, 2007)
Yesterday was a nightmare.
Most of my blogs were working just fine. This one and B-2 worked fine for users - the problem was I couldn’t log into the Wordpress admin at all (strangely, the subdomain blogs on B-2 would still let me log in). I did lots of things to try to fix it, from removing my spam blocking code in htaccess to reinstalling Wordpress. The spammer code - the redirects to give referral spammers a “forbidden” error - were the only recent change I’d made, and these were the only two sites I’d tried it on.
Was it the problem? I doubt I’ll ever find out. Mysteriously, the problem resolved on its own last night. (This was after I’d asked the host on B-2 to help, and their first step (this boggles my mind) was to reinstall yesterday’s backup and destroy the posts and comments from over 24 hours. In my humble opinion, that’s a radical thing and they shouldn’t just default to that as the first effort, especially not without asking you if it’s okay. It’s kind of like wiping the hard drive because one of the programs is hanging up - can’t we poke around the programs and see if there’s a less destructive solution first? (And in the middle of this, the other blogs on the B-2 domain - which had been working fine - went all screwy, and I spent a lot of time yesterday restoring permissions settings and stuff.
That was my entire day. How was yours?
By the time all was restored, the redirect code to block spammers had been abandoned. I’m still not sure it’s not the culprit - it’s the only thing those two sites had in common, and none of my other sites had. So I’m back to blocking IPs, which means every six or twelve months I have to check those IPs and make certain they haven’t been sold to decent people with knitting blogs or something. I hate spammers.
This brought to light my desperate need to find an automated backup solution for the B-2 bomber database. It’s way too big for the Wordpress system - the comments and posts alone are quite a few MBs, and I see no way to trim those down. I did finally realize that if I eliminate the SpamKarma tables from backup, it works (you don’t really need to back those up - I wish I’d realized this before). I’ve set it to email me a freakin’ backup every hour - from testing, it appears it will work. Now I wait and see. (ETA: the first auto backup came through just fine. Why wasn’t this working before? My SK2 tables were gargantuan - it wasn’t purging like I understood it should be according to my settings. I’ve now manually deleted a lot of stuff from those tables, going back to 2005.)
Of course, eventually even the posts and comments tables will be too big to back up. What do you do at that point?
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