I’ve been travelling – then the site crashed again!

Nothing is worse than going on annual leave an then trying to fix something back at home!

So, I’ve been out and about (thanks Steve), on leave with the dogs, enjoying the Scottish Highlands, then had a brain wave that I should of brought a kilt for the trip, just to fit in – or not. We stayed in a lovely place with a hot tub and the weather was quite frankly fantastic for most of it, very little rain and the dogs loved it.

Great, lovely time, until Thursday 30th April when Jetpack while on a train to Glenfinnan to see the Viaduct or as one guard calls it, “the Harry Potter bridge” (quite an accurate description) tells me my site went off line for… an unknwon reason. The last backup was 67 days ago – which wasn’t automatic, it crashed because the folder on the WebDAV server it backs up to doesn’t exist. And worse, the backup is now lost. Not good. So looked and couldn’t find anything obvious.

You may of noticed I didn’t manage to lose everything because this site uses cPanel as it’s base, WordPress as the Content Management System with some custom artwork, not added any custom scripts and in between trying to restore this site, I was helping “Steve” move, again.

How I did it?

Well, I kept getting a 404 error with additional stuff, so looked at the logs, nothing, searched the web, nothing and then I sat down, by finding some time to do so (to be frank, I was tired out, with going up 2 different flights of steps several times), backed up the site using cPanel’s built in tools as this was the only thing accessible, then separately backed up my assets (files, html, cgi-bin folders) ..
… save to my remote desktop …
… delete the site …
… reinstalled WordPress ….
… didn’t work, oh great! Same 404 error returned.

Ok, attempt 2, delete the site (again), then create a HTML file in Kate (good job I didn’t forget how to create a basic HTML file, look mum! I can code in HTML!), upload it to the server as “index.html” and then access the URL.

Well, it works, so there isn’t a configuration issue I need to send a support email to.
Right, delete everything bar 3 folders that I listed above.
Reinstall WordPress (again) and then access the URL again

We got something! Small victory. Now the next question, do I have to redo everything or go back to an earlier backup? Lets find out..
Use cPanel’s wordpress management module, restore the site.
Give it 5 to 10 minutes

Point to URL, it worked! But no other links work. Ok, do a Google search, find out its the permalinks, reset everything and now everything works. Yay!

Now I need the easy button, not bad for thinking on my head.

Next problem, some elements are missing, that’s because Pagelayer is disabled, so some things will have to be redone – so it will take me another 20 years to sort. As well as add more (older) content.

So fixed, as a bonus, as it seems to be sitting on a block of jenga blocks that are being removed one by one and waiting for me to sneeze, so the site collapses again, I’ve used Backupy to back everything on to the same WebDAV server – I’ve still not learnt my lesson.