About backups

Still creating websites in 2026, it’s a lot like managing a museum (or worse, doing restoration work). After a discussion on the Spip forums about the opportunity to delete old KBAs concerning PHP3, I realize it had been a long while since I had last checked my old websites. And of course, one of them had stopped working. Why and how ?

It turns out the host had, at some point, erased the SQL database. To reach that conclusion I had first to find my old FTP logins, then collect the websites’ files and compare them to a backup to ensure it had not been hacked, and finally narrowing down to a SQL problem after observing the errors, figure out what my SQL identifiers were, and check the database on PHPMyAdmin - surprise, it’s not there. Now, to restore it, I need to find my own backup...

And here’s the drama : impossible to find the database backup. Why ?

• Well, for laziness reasons, I had never stored my SQL backups in the same folder as the website’s code. They were somewhere else, and I could not remember where
• Also, I did not remember the name of the backup files, and searching for the obvious names did not yield anything

I was eventually able to find one backup in an old Downloads folder that I had on a backup disk, with an odd name. Normally there should be no important files in downloads as well they’re downloads. But that’s where it was, and I was able to restore the base.

Afterthoughts :

• Store database backups with the projects and not in unrelated locations
• give them proper names (project name + date time)
• Ideally a documentation should indicate where the backups are
• And of course, do not delete files without care.