All Hail Mike Pacific

My friends and relatives all think I’m a geek. I can fix most problems plaguing PCs. I built this website. I build my own computers.

Sometimes, even a geek needs someone geekier!

Yesterday morning I went to check on this site and found a cryptic automated note from the server. My blogging software wasn’t connecting to its database. Uh oh.

Further investigation showed the MySQL database had become corrupted, unrepairable.

A database is an organized storage system. It allows large amounts of information to be stored in a way that makes accessing any part easy.

The database for geofffox.com runs around 120mb. It contains everything I’ve written, links to the various photos and videos on the blog and your comments–all 23,000 of them! No database, no blog.

Thankfully, my webhost had a backup only a few days old. It was ‘dumped’ to disk on schedule, when the blog was working. All I had to do was overwrite the bad file with the backup.

Easier said than done. The database interface has a file size limit. Mine was way larger! Even compressing the database didn’t help.

mike pacificWhat I needed was a supergeek; a special person with the ability to use cryptic typed MySQL commands to make the database manager accept my backup. The people are the unicorns of the tech world!

My supergeek is Mike Pacific, originally of Bethel, CT, but now conveniently in Oregon and my time zone. He is tech lead at a digital marketing firm.

I emailed him my login credentials this morning and within a few minutes…

and you’re back!

And, I was.

One entry was lost in the shuffle, but Google had it cached so even it’s back online now.

Ten years of work in that one database. Scary times.

Mike Pacific, wear your geekiness with pride. You are the man.

11 thoughts on “All Hail Mike Pacific”

  1. Kudos to Mike Pacific! But as I said the other day, Geoff! Thank heavens for backups! Glad to see you back “on the air”.

  2. Why would anyone corrupt your blog? What is the purpose of ruining someone’s writings of 10 years. Or was it corrupted by some other computer thing I have no clue about?

    1. In this case corrupted means data out of place or missing. The structure of the database was no longer intact. The data was probably still there, but not where it was expected to be. It could be a disk write error or some strange confluence of events. Hacking is possible, but not likely.

  3. I’m guessing the guy on the motorcycle just made a wrong turn somewhere and broke down. Mike P knew how to get him back on the ‘road’ 🙂

    1. Mike was able to replace the corrupt database with the good backup. The problem is the ‘easy’ system to do that isn’t built to accommodate databases as large as mine. Mike had to actually type commands into a terminal. It’s easy when you know how. Knowing how isn’t easy! This is a mystical art.

      I’m geeky, but this is WAY out of my league.

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