Okay, so apparently there is a bug in the MT-Blacklist plugin. The plugin keeps comment spam off my blog. The bug occurs if you delete a blog. It deletes an extra one. I discovered the bug this morning when I deleted an empty blog I had set up for testing purposes, and another one disappeared.
The output pages are still there, so the site is fine as long as we leave it static. But the underlying data is gone. I logged into the database to check. All the entries, categories, templates: all gone.
I wrote to my hosting account to see if they can restore my data. But I have a bad feeling that backing up up the DB was my responsibility. In which case I'm screwed. I think I can write a script to strip the code out of the existing pages and convert them into a format that MT can import. But all the templates will have to be rewritten, and they were pretty complicated. Jesus. I feel sick to my stomach thinking about it.
I went to the user forum and this problem has been known since September 2004. And I have to say I'm rather pissed off at Six Apart. Their response on the forum was "gee that's too bad, but it was a plug in, not MT itself, so you're on your own." It's true, it was a third party plugin, but the third party now works for Six Apart. Even before he did, they included MT-Blacklist in their recommended plugin pack and have been encouraging everyone to install it since it came out. And they've known it caused a critical failure for almost a year. How hard would it have been for them to send an email to all paid users with a link to the bug fix?
I estimate that site took me about 30 hours to set up. I'll be thinking about Six Apart's great customer service every minute that I spend recreating it.
[Update; Just heard back from pair.com. They don't keep backups of individual user databases. This sucks.]
jesus, that sucks beyond all comprehension. i know what all you did with that site and i know what it's going to take to get it back. damn.
i'm trying to think of something that could help but so far i've got bupkuss. i'll keep thinking. at the moment, my thoughts are along the lines of, maybe it's time to try a different tool, since this one let you down.
do you have any idea of when david will next want to update his site?
yeah, with no DB backup I think I'm up the proverbial creek :) Fortunately David doesn't add to his site very often, and he'd be understanding if I told him I was covered up with work and couldn't get to his updates for a week or two. So I have some time to fix it. I think it will be easier to do over than the initial development, since this time I know exactly what the finished site should look like and vaguely remember how I did it.
It sucks that the templates are gone (and WHY, oh why, didn't I link the templates to external files? I did that with my own blog, but not this one) but at least I still have the finished pages to work backward from.
If I'm lucky I won't have to deal with it until after art car season is over at the end of August. In the meantime Georg and I took the dogs for a walk in the park, which was great for clearing my head and reminding me that David's site was ruined, not my entire life.
(and hey, this gives me an excuse to convert the site to semantic markup :)
Not much to add beyond, "That sucks." I've alerted the webmaster of the Howling Curmudgeons about this bug--I figure if you missed it, it's easy to miss.
Do you have any recommendations for tools for working with Moveable Type? I don't like the MT interface much.
kevin-- if by 'working with' you mean posting, there's an application called Ecto that you run on your computer (may be Mac specific-- i'm not sure) that gives you a way to post to your MT blog from within a richer application.