Oy.

Okay. I’ve got a lot of blogs and I do have backup routines in place. Basically, every night a backup of the MySQL database is being emailed to one of my gMail accounts .. for every blog of mine.

But, after 3154 emailed backups with attachments .. I have finally received the following in my regular email.

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

IN MY GMAIL ACCOUNT

You are currently using 2874 MB (99%) of your 2874 MB.

That’s right! I’ve used up 2.5 GIG of free space for backups of my blogging data. That’s since the last time that I cleaned out my gmail account – to December 31, 2006.

So, I get about 30 of these rejected emails … so what did I do?

I deleted everything!

Yup. I probably should have made a backup first, or saved yesterday’s backups – but I didn’t. In fact, if that doesn’t sound really stupid .. how about this?

I checked my available space AFTER deleting everything in my gMail account and it showed:

You are currently using 2874 MB (99%) of your 2874 MB.

That’s right! gMAIL doesn’t actually delete anything .. it just transfers everything to the TRASH and will automatically delete it in 30 days. Of course, I didn’t check the TRASH until I received another email message stating that an email sent with an attached backup failed … then, I emptied TRASH – 3155 emails.

I think next time I will probably make a backup before deleting everything … I do have clean backups when I closed down all my servers ISP#1 and ISP#2 in early June 2007 .. so, it’s not that serious in my mind. I guess that’s why I was careless.

Careless .. I say that outloud because it was me. But, honestly .. the reality would seem to be that as much as I preach about making backups, I’m less likely to be safe on my own computer. Yet – already my backups at June 2007 are almost obsolete, because they were made when most of my sites were at wordpress version 2.1. Currently, all my sites are at the wordpress version 2.2.1 version. Everytime there is an upgrade, it changes the MySQL database and I’m worried what will every happen if I really do have a crash – and have to restore a backup from an earlier point in time.

To me, restoration at its finest will be taking yesterday’s backup and restoring it onto the system as if nothing ever happened. Backups prior to yesterday are really not that useful to me … unless yesterday’s backups turned out to be faulty.

At the new server, in my “VPS Account” (Virtual Private Server) .. I haven’t even had time to create automated or even manual backups from within my VPS Manager. I think I can do that. Pitiful, eh? I really don’t know.

But today, July 11th is my birthday and it is now a good time to start a better routine for a whole lot of things, including better management of the database and the backups.