You may have come to the blog as a repeat visitor or you may have come as a new visitor coming to look for a specific article.
As you may have noticed the blog is looking some what lacking of articles. There is a very god reason for this and of course a lesson for us all. While setting up a database for another project within the cPanel account that houses them I had accidentally clicked on a link.As you have probably guessed by now that link was the delete database link. I was somewhat annoyed at the fact that one I had been so stupid to have clicked on the link, two that cPanel had not requested assurance that I did in fact wish to delete the database instead of running headlong into it.
On investigation I find the reason it did not request a confirmation is because I was using the old x2 theme. What ever possessed cPanel to omit such a feature back in that version. I find of course that the x3 theme would have saved me. Too late now of course.
I was safe in the knowledge of course that I did have a backup that cPanel has faithfully been creating for me all this time.
Guess again. Now I find that cPanel unbeknown to me has not carried out any backups since 2008. cPanel had not informed me of any problem with the backup process. On investigation I find that for some reason within the contact manager the only job that does not have email alerts (even though it is set to medium) is the backup process. For some reason this process has email grayed out. Strangely enough all other processes (even the other medium ones) have email highlighted.
The lessons we can learn from this of course are as follows:
- Be very careful what you click on in your control panel.
- Ensure that all software is fully up to date.
- Ensure the configuration is always updated.
- Never trust that software is carrying out the tasks you expect it to be.
- Always check the integrity of backups.
The plus side of course is at least the problem occurred on a project that will not lose me any money. Hopefully the lesson has been learnt.