Over the past week I have been trying to keep my composure after a botched software install destroyed 100s of hours worth of work, not to mention all the databases that held the data the work was supporting.
It all began about a week ago when I installed a trial application. This trial was not designed for the latest version of OS X and required Rosetta be installed. OK no big deal. Been in this place before back in my Tiger days. So I let it install Rosetta and the demo or trial as they call it worked OK. Now when the fun begins.
I ran the un-installer application and it removed the application without problem -- gone, goodbye, sianara, etc. Then I resumed where I was before trying out the trial. First thing I got was an error in MySQL when I went to open my local server. So I read the error and it said it could not find the databases. OK fine, a little permissions problem.
I ran the disk utility and did a repair permissions. It completed and I tried again. Same error! Now I am getting concerned. I go to the DB directory and all the databases have just vanished. No where to be found. Not even in the trash. So something in the un-installer caused all my databases to be overwritten. It is the only thing I can assume because nothing else makes sense.
Now it gets better -- I go to my latest Time Machine backup and proceed to restore the missing DB’s and low and behold they aren’t there! Search back day by day for a month and they just where gone. Now I don’t know how this could be because Time Machine creates a versional copy. To this day I have no clue where or how my databases where running or how they disappeared.
I called Apple tech support and the only advice they could or would give me was to re-install OS X and then update to the latest version. Witch is what I was forced to do. So now I have started over. Pretty much got the base DB’s rebuilt however it will take several weeks to get all the data transferred and rebuilt. So the planned update of the site will have to wait a little longer. Sorry!
Take my advice, keep two (2) backup copies of your work. If you use Time Machine make sure you do a full backup on an other disk as Time Machine only takes a full backup the first time you initialize the software. From that point forward it is all incremental’s.
