So yesterday, when I was editing the "iPirate" entry, I found that a backslash was being inserted in front of all my quotes and double-quotes.
So, "iPirate" became \"iPirate\".
This was frustrating, to say the least.
(Above is the "Tweet of Doom" which apparently started everything. I guess I made one too many Apple jokes, because almost immediately after sending this tweet, things went downhill.)
I didn't have time to troubleshoot the issue, so I thought I would just get creative and update the entry in the database with a query:
update node_revisions set body = "I drew this back in 2005 [...] i-Pod was introduced.";
What I forgot to include was
where nid = 943
This had the effect of changing the text for all 943 nodes to the above.
Needless to say, I was horrified.
I took the site offline and it took me about three hours to get things back in order. Fortunately, I had a database dump from April 3rd. I used that and then manually stitched on the newer entries with the text still set to the mistake. It turns out that the node_revisions table also has a column named "teaser" and, because most of my posts aren't very long, for the 30 or so that were not in the backup, I was able to use the teaser text.
The image links are kept in another table altogether.
After that, I searched the cache files from my recent Firefox and Chrome sessions and was able to piece together the remaining missing text.
Bottom line is, I am going to set up a cron job to dump the database nightly.
It turns out that my hosting provider upgrading from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 somehow caused PHP to start inserting the backslashes.
Host Monster's support is awesome - they were able to help me diagnose and fix the problem this morning (Saturday!) within ten minutes of my emailing a request for help.
(Above is the "Tweet of Doom" which apparently started everything. I guess I made one too many Apple jokes, because almost immediately after sending this tweet, things went downhill.)
I didn't have time to troubleshoot the issue, so I thought I would just get creative and update the entry in the database with a query:
update node_revisions set body = "I drew this back in 2005 [...] i-Pod was introduced.";
What I forgot to include was
where nid = 943
This had the effect of changing the text for all 943 nodes to the above.
Needless to say, I was horrified.
I took the site offline and it took me about three hours to get things back in order. Fortunately, I had a database dump from April 3rd. I used that and then manually stitched on the newer entries with the text still set to the mistake. It turns out that the node_revisions table also has a column named "teaser" and, because most of my posts aren't very long, for the 30 or so that were not in the backup, I was able to use the teaser text.
The image links are kept in another table altogether.
After that, I searched the cache files from my recent Firefox and Chrome sessions and was able to piece together the remaining missing text.
Bottom line is, I am going to set up a cron job to dump the database nightly.
It turns out that my hosting provider upgrading from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 somehow caused PHP to start inserting the backslashes.
Host Monster's support is awesome - they were able to help me diagnose and fix the problem this morning (Saturday!) within ten minutes of my emailing a request for help.