I was finally getting around to migrating an older bloggy/journal site to a much more stable server and from MovableType to the newest version of Wordpress; while reviewing the list of my other databases hosted at pair (a fantastic hosting service, btw), I saw one I didn’t recall. The internal convo went something like this:

Idiot voice: oh, that’s just the db you set up when prepping the area for your new WP install. Really. You can just delete that and start from scratch since this new version has slightly different tables.

oh-so-tentative voice of sanity: Ah. Is that so? Yeah, you’re probably right. Maybe I should just do a dump of it, though, or at the very least have a peek to make sure there isn’t any content in there…

IV: Oh, pshaw! Don’t be silly. You know that’s the staging area and there’s nothing in there yet! Go ahead, it’s fine to delete. No worries.

OSTVoS: Yeah, ok. You must be right, that was my temp database. Ok, I’ll delete…. (hours later, the voice of sanity is found cursing its lack of backbone in the face of Idiot Voice’s complete - and unwarranted - self-confidence)

And that was how I inadvertently deleted my complete eliterateLibrarian set of postings and comments. Sigh. Honestly, I do know better, but that damned Idiot Voice can be so convincing. Anyway - thank goodness for some older XML archived files (that I haven’t yet figured out how to import) and, amusingly enough to me, Google’s cache, I can salvage most of my postings if not all of the comments (which weren’t many in number, anyway). My next task, though, is to find a way to modify my newest WP installation; as my new job doesn’t have me working on many projects that are really library-related in nature I’m guessing that postings here will be even fewer in number than I had previously hoped, so I want to automate a way to send any library-related postings that originate at my other web space to this area so it’s not completely defunct.