I had just abut finished cleaning last night, when I noticed that a new beta version of MovableType is now available. I decided I would upgrade to it in a little while, until I saw that one of the "32 Favorite Features in Movable Type 3.2" is "Easiest Upgrade Ever." There's even a short flash clip that brags about this.
Please have a look! It'll only take a few seconds...
See!? Nearly anyone could do this!
Since it apparently would only take a few seconds to upgrade, I decided to take care of it before going to bed. I downloaded the files, uploaded them, and surely enough, an upgrade screen came up when I went to my Movable Type log in screen. Upon allowing the script to proceed, it ran a couple operations and then informed me that it was done.
I tried to log in, but my username/password didn't work. I had experienced the same thing when switching hosts last winter, which is a great part of the reason a lot of my entries are still missing. I proceeded to use the default login that comes with the installation instructions, and this worked.
But... All my entries were gone! I did have a backup, but this was the same one that I had used in my host move, and this not only didn't contain my entries from the last several months, but also failed to import a good deal of entries that were actually stored in it. Additionally, I had already manually re-entered a bunch of entries from the early days of my weblog, which also weren't in this backup. Also, all my templates and settings were wiped out.
I was horribly angry. My entries were all in my archives folder of my weblog, but there's apparently no way to import these back into the Movable Type database. A couple of hours ago, I accepted my fate, and wanted to begin manually re-entering all my entries. But, as I had been messing around with files before, Movable Type wasn't working right.
So I decided to delete all Movable Type files, except for the archives folder, and reinstall the beta. I did this, and again got the "easy upgrade" screen, which again ran a bunch of processes.
But... I was able to log in with my old username/password, and... All my entries (pre-upgrade) were there!. So Movable Type must now be able to pull entries out of the archives folder after all!? Anyway, this made my night, as it saved me days, if not weeks, of work.
I still have a good amount of entries to re-enter from my old Xanga weblog, and the ones that didn't transfer last winter. But these are of less importance to me. I'll slowly get to them eventually, spending a couple minutes a day to re-enter a couple.
I learned a couple of good lessons though...
1. It's always important to backup your data.
2. Don't make random decisions to upgrade important stuff at 1 a.m.
3. Nothing is as easy as it looks.
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