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.
What 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.