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Deleted all comments by accident

2009-10-13 5:49 am 15 Comments , , and

I just accidentally deleted all comments made on this blog.

This blog is homegrown and hand-made. It has a very simple spamfilter that catches most spam comments. The few that make it through though, I've been deleting myself using the mysql console.

I tend to write simple queries, ending in: .. AND id = 1234, but today I forgot the id =. I had a backup from October 2008, so some old comments are back now, but I'm still pretty sad.

Lesson from today: make backups! I'm pretty good with things I do for clients, but I tend to not uphold the same standards for my own projects.

15 Responses to Deleted all comments by accident

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  1. 1008 Rob 2009-10-12 11:24 pm

    Sidekick status!!

  2. 1009 Brian 2009-10-12 11:33 pm

    Another tip - run mysql with --i-am-a-dummy (aka --safe-updates). If you're on Linux, you can even alias it:

    alias safemysql=mysql --i-am-a-dummy

  3. 1007 Ryan Thiessen 2009-10-13 12:18 am

    Ouch. However, we've all been there before. At least you learned this lesson on your own dataset, some admins at Danger could have used that lesson quite recently...

  4. 1005 Anon 2009-10-13 12:21 am

    Um... LIMIT much?

  5. 1003 Matt 2009-10-13 12:40 am

    one word... BACKUPS!

  6. 1004 Les 2009-10-13 1:15 am

    These things happen to the best of us, and your not alone by taking it easy with your own projects, as developers, we are all lazy.

    It's in our nature :o

  7. 1001 Anonymous 2009-10-13 2:24 am

    Doesn't MySQL have BEGIN TRANSACTION? Which you can then rollback?

  8. 1002 Vadim 2009-10-13 4:03 am

    If you use InnoDB, it's still possible to get data back.
    You can check InnoDB recovery tool.

  9. 1000 Andy Walpole 2009-10-13 6:27 am

    oh dear oh dear oh dear... he he :)

  10. 999 Mohammad Lahlouh 2009-10-13 6:39 am

    Are you turn on the binary log?

    you can execute bin log from the backup time to delete statement.

    It's easy

  11. 998 Richard Heyes 2009-10-13 8:38 am

    You're not alone! I recently very nearly lost my entire blog due to a server crash. I've now got more backups than I know what to do with. A bit daft really - only need a couple... :-/

  12. 997 Joris van de Sande 2009-10-13 8:45 am

    Too bad that you have lost all your comments :(. Thanks for the reminder! As soon as I get home today I am going to write a backup script.

  13. 996 equivoc 2009-10-13 9:06 am

    Check google cache: http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:LT42H3QFnacJ:www.rooftopsolutions.nl/article/253+http://www.rooftopsolutions.nl/article/253&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de&client=firefox-a

  14. 995 Pikaczu 2009-10-13 11:11 am

    What about using mysql tools that have "safe query" detection, like this: http://www.gosu.pl/dbkiss/ - see the screenshot and the feature "Error: Detected UPDATE/DELETE without WHERE condition ..."

  15. 994 Evert 2009-10-13 12:27 pm

    Thanks for all the replies :)

    I do have a binary log! Good point !

    Now I need to find out how to rewind it, without affecting the new data..

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My name is Evert, and I've been writing semi-regularly on this blog since 2006.

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