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About a month ago, I created a post called “Wiki Wiki WIki” where I talked about setting up a Wiki for my own personal use.  Well, at the time, I set it up on a MySQL instance that I’d set aside purely for testing things, but was using for nothing else.  I then made two fatal oversights….

Firstly, I didn’t change the description on the database.  It was set to something like “Test DB” (always fatal).

Secondly, once I’d put many hours into building my site and populating it with tons of useful content, I didn’t take the time to backup the tables.

You can guess what’s coming, can’t you……

So, fast forward to the weekend just gone.  I was working on a new project which requires a MySQL database for both a blog and a forum.  (Don’t ask about this yet - I’ll announce it when it’s ready to go live!)  Since I was using my allocation of MySQL databases from my ISP, and I didn’t want to add additional databases when I wasn’t using anywhere near the capacity of the exitsing ones, I decided to delete my test database and start with a nice, new, clean MySQL instance!

You can imagine what my Wiki looks like now:

So the moral of this story is:

1. Make sure you label all your databases acurately
2. Take export dumps of your tables on a regular basis
3. Use an ISP that allows unlimited databases…!!!

If anyone would like a tutorial on exporting MySQL tables, please leave a note in the comments and I’ll put something together for you.

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