08.09.06
A Lesson in Patience
Our close calls are there for a reason.
I was working on a little blog strategy yesterday. I was planning to bounce some information back and forth between this blog and my Blogger account, Work at Home Supertips for a bit of a traffic boost.
I had a few article summaries written to place in Blogger with links to Word Wrangler Press (WWP), and had copied a couple of those links from WWP for use at around 9:00 pm (Pacific).
About midnight, I was ready to perform the deed when I double-checked one of those links.
The check came back with a MySQL error in the database storing WWP.
I checked a couple other tools that I use that also use MySQL and discovered errors in each of them, so I shot over to my backend to check it out.
I clicked on MySQL Databases and found all of my databases missing in action.
Psffttt! Gone!!!
I must be getting better at this patience thing. Of course I have had some 50 odd years to practice it (some odder than others;), but this is how I know this was a test of patience.
I wasn’t immediately seized with that old feeling of fear that starts out as a knot in my stomach, and works its way out until everything, especially my mind, is knotted up as well.
This little test of patience was reminder for me that a good backup plan is crucial in the grand scheme of things.
The Great Spirit revealed this to me gently (for which I’m grateful), through an uncanny set of circumstances.
As soon as I was done checking those links out, I had planned on performing a full backup of my site. (No. Really. I was planning to!)
It had been way too long since the last one though, and I believe that this “glitch” was allowed to happen for one purpose, that being to underscore in my mind the importance of backing up all critical aspects of my site, including databases.
Since I was planning on it anyway, it had a secondary affect of encouraging me for being on the right track.
I really believe that close calls are there for a reason.
I was fortunate this time. My host was simply doing some regular maintenance and the SQL server was temporarily off-line.
It could have been a lot worse, catastrophic in fact, but I’m sure that my patience and failure to jump to any conclusions based on fear are what saved the day in this close call.
My dad always used to say, “Dave.” (He called me Dave.) “Learn from my mistakes and you won’t have to make as many of your own.”
I seem to have done that more in the 5 years he’s been gone, than I ever did while he was here.
Now it’s your turn to learn from my mistakes, even though I technically didn’t make one, unless you consider not backing up a sin of omission;-)
Don’t wait for close calls to give you a reason to do the things you know that you need to.
That goes for your business and your personal life.
Love people, embrace life, and though you can’t always back up some of the things that life dishes out, you can and should back up your data.
Dave