Leaving well alone – shoulda

You know those times when you see ‘update’ and off you go and click only to wish you hadn’t? Well, I had one of those moments earlier today with my VPS and Plesk. Plesk told me there are updates available to version 9, so I thought, why not?

• First mistake (and I should know better) – I didn’t do a backup prior to updating
• Second mistake (and I should know better) – I didn’t research to see if there are any issues that others have found.

So, having clicked update, off it went and updated from Plesk 8 to Plesk 9. The first issue was that it didn’t recognise the license key and refused to work. I re-booted the VPS and that sorted itself out somehow. I then noticed that the left-hand navigation was missing some of the icons. This set me off looking for answers…

Several hours later, I see it’s a wide-spread issue for those of us using Virtuozzo and VPS. It’s borked!

Fortunately, I had taken a backup of the VPS recently (3 weeks ago),  so I decided to restore. First I took a backup of my WordPress database and wp-content directory. I also took screen shots of all of the relevant settings for my domains and email accounts (on the Mac screen print is Mac key+Shift+3 which creates a picture.png file on the desktop – nice).

I then took a backup of the VPS in its current borked state, then restored…

All went well. I have ftp’d my wp-content directory and restored my WordPress database. All is well so far.

Now I just need to go and set up a couple of new domains, email accounts and re-upload all my Joomla and Drupal stuff.

Lesson learned – backup, backup, backup. And I should know better.