I’ve been a big fan of moving my personal page over to AWS Lightsail. But, if I had one complaint, it’s the dangerous combination of (1) their pre-packaged WordPress image being hard to upgrade software on and (2) the training-wheel-lacking full root access that Lightsail gives to its customers. That combination led me to make some regrettable mistakes yesterday which resulted in the complete loss of my old blog posts and pages.
It’s the most painful when you know your problems are your own fault. Thankfully, with the very same AWS Lightsail, it’s easy enough to start up a new WordPress instance. With the help of site visit and search engine analytics, I’ve prioritized the most popular posts and pages to resurrect using Google’s cache.
Unfortunately, that process led to my email subscribers receiving way too many emails from me as I recreated each post. For that, I’m sorry — mea culpa — it shouldn’t happen again.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ve lost the majority of the 10+ years of content I’ve created. But, I’ve now learned the value of systematically backing up things (especially my AWS Lightsail instance), and hopefully I’ll write some good content in the future to make up for what was lost.
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