After the Hack, Restore, or Start Fresh?

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Welcome back. We’re picking up Heather’s “Silence is Golden” story from a couple of days ago. She’s played some video games, had a good night’s sleep, let’s see what she is going to do next.

An unwelcome visitor, continued

-by Heather Craik

After some thinking and a good sleep I actually started to feel pretty positive about the whole thing. My old work in its old form was gone. However, I still had all of the posts themselves in their original form. In addition, there were also time constraints on me due to college work and so on; I hadn’t had time to update as often as I liked, because I couldn’t justify creating loads of new posts in my current scrambling situation.

Then the pieces were picked up

Plus, there were other things I’d been wanting to test out on my blog that I’d been putting off; too new, too much work, not enough time. Inadvertently, what this hacking had done was give me a golden, shining opportunity to change. I had an excuse now. “Oh, I was hacked so I had to change a few things” – if the change didn’t work I could always use that.

(I never did, because that would have been wrong and highly hypocritical. Being human though, it was nice to have the illusionary safety net. I won’t tell if you won’t.)

New and improved plan in hand, I ventured forth into the decaying ruins that had been my blog. Destroy and rebuild; Change. I was excited, and possibly even happy. Here was the chance to take everything I’d done right, cull the stuff I’d done wrong, polish everything up and remake it – but better!

Plans were made…

It took me the better part of a day to get my WordPress installations up; themes, posts, comics, and so on could come later. There were all sorts of little problems that demanded attention, crying and bawling at me until they were fixed (the RSS feed was possibly the loudest). In the end, I decided that I could take time to get it right. There was no need to rush and make it all perfect all at once.

If I was going to redo it all, then by golly I was going to do it properly.

…and plans found unnecessary

Now while I was trying to fix the niggles and errors in my new blog I got a load of work moved forward a week in college; the whole site ground to a halt while I dealt with my main project. This meant that it was still broken by Saturday. (The cavalry always arrives on Saturday.)

I’m referring of course to Brian, my host/system admin/tech support. I don’t really like to bug him for normal, everyday things but in situations like this he’s great to have on board. Cutting a long story short, Brian restored my backup the correct way and everything up until the 3rd of May returned.

New ideas were spawned

“But Heather, what of your new and exciting plans to make it better? Doesn’t having it all back defeat the purpose?”

Honestly? Yes and no. Everything I’d planned to do had assumed a clean slate, where I could change categories and tags with impunity and re-write everything without risk of duplication. However, having everything back saved me from a lot of 404 errors (hadn’t even wanted to think about those before) and meant that I could look at things from a different perspective.

All was definitely not lost and large amounts were gained. With some tweaking I could still go ahead and create the blog my readers deserve. Smarter steps were needed but the direction remained the same.

And the event was reviewed

Wrong Moves:

1. I ignored that there was a problem for almost a full day before I looked at it properly.
2. I let it affect the entire rest of my day after discovery.
3. I handed the power to affect my mood over to the hacker. (cliche, maybe, but true)
4. I deleted the original files, and tried to fix everything on my own.
5. I wasn’t aware of how to restore my backup properly, which led to the assumption that it didn’t work.

Right Moves:

1. I removed myself from the situation instead of jumping in to fix it straight away.
2. I sought help from people more experienced than I was (helpful also for the side benefit of support).
3. I had a backup, however long ago it had been.
4. I planned, even when I thought all was lost.
5. I kept going.

Bringing us to the conclusion

Ultimately the whole experience was more annoying than damaging. The hacker hadn’t done anything truly horrible like remove every single file in the directory, nor had they gained access to cPanel itself (where they could have deleted the backups and left me at the mercy of whatever I had on my own hard drive). Everyone says ‘back up your blog’. They’re right to do so.

However lets amend it to ‘Back up your blog at least every week and find out how to restore them properly‘. You can bet I will be.

Another saying that’s often bandied about is ‘look before you leap’ – If you have someone you know could help you then don’t do anything drastic in the meantime. The only solution visible to you might be a complete overhaul.

However, we’re not the most objective people when it comes to our own blogs. Consulting someone more knowledgeable is definitely worth your time.

One last thought:

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti.

Dave here… question for readers: If you had a major hack, would you restore everything exactly as it was before the hack? Or would you take the opportunity to do a major upgrade?

Heather writes The 3D Student providing video tutorials, reviews, and advice for 3D students. She loves working with light and texture for animation and modeling, writing, drawing, film and playing video games. Visit Heather at The 3D Student.