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.