Blog? I managed to wipe out my entire site in one click! I’ll begin with a moral for this story-

Be wary of how sometimes the fingers can move faster than the brain. When it comes to repetitive actions. Lesson learned.

The story:

Background: It is important to note in this context that my mom’s birthday was coming up. I’d been hard at work making her all new site with shopping cart, spent most of the last week figuring out how to transfer VirtueMart databases from a Joomla 1x to 1.5x site. By no means an easy process, and one that has been a cause of immense frustration practically the whole of last year. Two days before her birthday, had finally cracked it and was busily making all the other thousand refinements that occur during website migration and new design.

Moral #1: ALWAYS back it up.

Although I do make it a habit to take regular backups, this site and blog plus a couple of other subdomains I’d set up, were done in Jan when my last backup of the site was 11 dec (c’mon- my root directory has some 400 MB of stuff in it, including a bunch of Joomla installs, downloadable stff etc…it was a pain so hey do it once a month-ish)

That day, my sister Nikki was over, she needed some help with a site she and my brother-in-law Amar are setting up. She’d been doing the content upload on a localhost Joomla install I’d put into her Mac, and I’d figured it’d be easier if the site was online so that I could edit it without her having to bring her machine over every time. So, we sat and set it up. With my recent experiences with Mom’s site, transferring all the content and databases was a breeze.

Now, once we’d figured out templates, modules etc etc it occurred to me that she’d have no way to bulk-upload the site images from her machine, so naturally I set up her FTP account via CPanel. To my annoyance, I discovered I’d forgotten to set it to the root directory of her site, it had defaulted to another path. Deleted it, set up another, giving her access this time to /public_html (the root of Trimensions.org) but forgetting to point to their subdomain. Twice as annoyed, I set about deleting that account as well.

Brain speed=60 : Finger speed=100

I forgot one tiny little detail. The ‘Delete FTP account’ page asks you if you want to delete just the account, or all the folders within it. Guess what button I pressed.

Bye bye root directory. We’ll miss you.

Naturally, for the first 12.657 microseconds I was frozen in shock.

My thoughts in the next two seconds went something like this-

-Shitshitshit where’s the cancel button? No cancel button. Fingers have already hit ‘back’ by now. Is there any way to override this? None that I can think of. Close the browser? Right, idiot. Think. Cpanel override command? Would take too long. Did I take a Cpanel backup? Hell it’s been a month. OMG Mom’s site!! Shit. The blog. Amul. Damn man do something, microseconds are passing and all your files are being deleted. Hit the ‘escape’ key dude and hope…

…at which point, two things happen.

-Nikki turns around and says, “Bhai, the site’s not working”

-And I get a ‘delete account-success’ message.

I’m still stunned. Check my site. All gone. Check CPanel trash. empty.  Somewhere in the middle of this, Nikki left quietly for parents’ place, figuring (correctly) that I was in no shape to continue with her site. Very accurately, since I’d just managed to delete it with the rest of my root folder. Thought of calling Prabudh over at GoHindi (who host Trimensions) to ask him if anything was possible, decided to see what I could do first instead. So, started checking out my backups. Realized that actually, it was only Mom, Nikki, Amul and this blog that were affected. And then realized that all their databases were still intact. None of the really difficult work I’d done was affected, actually.

On the other hand, I did have to re-upload almost 400 MB worth of data, including the Trimensions site and all its virtual spaces. And work day and night to re-make mom’s site from scratch before her birthday. Finally finished at 6:30 AM on the 29th, to show it to her a few hours later. And hey, my root directory is a lot cleaner than it used to be, and this blog is back up, so no real harm done. Some serious adrenaline though. Phew.