Lesson Learned: ALWAYS Back Up Your Data

Last week, I did the most frightening thing any blogger could ever dream of. Being the perfectionist that I am, I focused on the smallest details of my theme and tried changing them. Even though it’s strongly advised not to tamper with the functions.php of your theme, I did so anyway, thinking that nothing too crazy could happen. Once I clicked “save” and refreshed my site, it happened. The infamous “white screen of death.” I panicked and clicked back in my history as many times as I could, hoping that my blog and content would magically reappear. But much to my dismay, it never came back.

I then started Googling solutions to my problem. The more I tried, the worse I made things. After a few hours, I was finally able to get my site back up but there was still one big problem… all my posts and pages were gone. I checked my database but couldn’t find them. While messing around with my site directory and the files within it, I had jumbled everything up. I was kicking myself for that rookie mistake. I’m still new to all this FTP and PHP stuff but one thing I now know for sure is to always back up your data — before and after you make any changes.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger. You never know when your site or laptop could crash and it’s always better to be safe than sorry. If you have pictures saved on your laptop, you wanna upload them to the cloud or onto an external hard drive. You should back up all your important PDFs and documents. Whenever I have a paper to turn in or a presentation to give, I always email myself a copy and upload it to Google Drive. I’ve also bought extra storage space for iCloud to back up my important documents. But for some reason, I never thought to back up my blog. Now my site is back but my posts are somewhere in limbo.

I’m trying to see the brighter side of this situation — I can start over with a clean slate and put even more effort into my posts. For the remainder of summer, I will attempt to make a new post every Sunday and Wednesday. Once school starts at the end of August, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to accomplish that but I’ll try my best. Until then, let’s all reintroduce ourselves and try to get to know each other a little better.

You can start by answering these questions: Have you ever been in my situation before? And how did you react to it? Leave your answers in the comments section and don’t forget to like and subscribe if you’d like to see more posts! Have a lovely day, everyone 🙂