When Backups Fail

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief December 19, 2005 · 1 min read

Listen to article

Instagram now lets users reorder their posts on their profile iOS 27 Adds Native Baybayin Keyboard to iPhone: Here is How to Enable It AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE announced GPD MicroPC 2 with Intel Core 3 N350 announced Nintendo Direct to unveil Switch 2 games for second half of 2026

Been up almost all night and all day, with but a couple of hours of rest. If you’ve noticed that Connie’s blog are gone, it’s because we’ve spent all hours fixing the whole database from last night.

Expression Engine recently released a free core upgrade and it was used on her blog. Unfortunately, the upgrade didn’t went well so we resorted to reloading the latest daily backup. That didn’t worked as well. We already had the help of one of the guys from EE (the main developer & CEO himself) but it turns out some of the tables in the DB were missing.

It’s a little tricky when you’re dealing with almost 2GB of cPanel backup and it runs on Expression Engine (something I don’t really like and understand as a blog CMS). I had to resort to using an old backup from another server but that was 3 months ago (this is the 4th copy of the redundant backups).

That should do for the meantime untIl we find a solution to this problem.

React to this article:

Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

8,007 Articles

View all posts by Abe Olandres →

33 Comments

Bangis · 20 years ago

Maybe this software can help:

http://www.cpsitesaver.com

Its a backup tool for cPanel.

luv2ride · 20 years ago

Can I assume by this article you were able to recover some of your data but not all? Did you actually make the conversion to wordpress and import all the data you had left from EE? If so would you care to share how you did the import and conversion. I would love to get all my EE data imported to WordPress.

demonhale · 20 years ago

by anychance a weblog be backed-raw by copying the files on your public folder then restoring it later, and all the way downloading a db backup on your cpanel and restoring it too?

If that isnt the case, well better use a flatfile instead…

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 20 years ago

I sent out a bug report (if indeed it is) to cPanel developers. Also I have reverted back the PHP version to 4.3.x from 4.4.x as EE was not compatible with it. Found that out when I upgraded PHP where PinoyBlog was installed a week back.

Ahhh… I need sleep. The last 48 hours was a nightmare.

gabriel · 20 years ago

man what a nightmare that must be. ms. connie must be all nerves right now.

From your description it seems that something happened between the time of the working backup to present that usually requires some update to the db and/or the sql file. If nothing of the sort happened, then that means someone goofed and just changed the schema without telling anyone, hence making backups useless.

btw its certainly not the first cpanel horror story i’ve heard. anyway good luck.

mell ditangco · 20 years ago

hey yuga that is scary stuff! i installed a backup plugin too, but i could not make it work!
yikes!

vern · 20 years ago

Backups from the console or if you don’t have access to it, using phpmyadmin work best.

Manuel Viloria · 20 years ago

Thanks for the info, Abe. Looks like I shouldn’t throw out those old static html blogging packages. It’s easier to make back-ups of those given cPanel quirkiness.

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 20 years ago

Yay, yes. We’re only upgrading to the latest stable version of cPanel, no less, so this could be a major bug or something if it’s true.

kzap · 20 years ago

thats scary then if cPanel is not backing up all the tables….

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 20 years ago

The compressed backup is just actually 300MB but the total files of the restored account is abour 1.8GB. The total mySQL data is just in the region of 250MB.

My theory is that cPanel may not be completing the backups or something.

@ Manuel

Could happen to any web app with that figure.

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 20 years ago

She did an EE backup last night. It didn’t went thru smotthly so she asked that I restore to the lastest daily backup. When I did, it wouldn’t work as well. We asked help from EE support and they found out that some of the tables in the EE db were missing.

I then tried the weekly backup (done 5 days ago). Didn’t work. I tried the monthly – didn’t work as well. There wree all missing the tables, esp. the blog entry table. I checked the individual mySQL files and tried restoring them from SSH but a 170+ MB DB only came out 90+ after restore. I opened the mysql file and check on the entries and it was missing the blog entry tables.

Last August, before we moved the acocunt to a dedicated server, I left an old cPanel backup. That one came out fine.