Web Site Nearly Wiped Out

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:23:14 GMT  <== Webmaster stuff ==> 

I decided to add --delete-after to an rsync command last night to keep one of my directories exactly matching the version on my local disk. Problem is, I was doing the rsync from that directory's parent, which had nothing else in it. So rsync started deleting files and directories at the top-level. Fortunately, I had -v in the command, so I saw this, and was able to stop it before everything was gone. Also, fortunately, most of the changes since I switched from my nearlyfreespeech.net hosting were either in the Drupal database, that this blog uses, or in one of two directories on my local disk. And I never shut down the old hosting location. So between those three places, and about an hour of my time, I believe I've restored everything. All the top-level links at billstclair.com work. And this blog. rsync'ed everything back to the backup location afterwards, to make it easier should I do something incredibly stupid like this again. Whew!

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