IBeautySpy Is Back! What Happened To My Blog?

Disaster struck in my life dangerously. Those who have been following me would have known that my blog website was down for a long time. I had forgot to make payment to Digital Ocean where my site is hosted ‘coz my life was all in a mess after Coronavirus started.

I had lost my job and was very depressed due to that. I am a person who is emotionally attached to my job, work and teammates. And having to leave all this is very difficult for me. My office felt like a home to me and I really loved everything, the work culture, my career plan, facilities. I never had a single complaint about anything or anyone ever. For someone who prefers a steady, routine and safe life, all this is a nightmare to me. Sometimes I feel life is but a paradox. The one who loves the office doesn’t get to work in it. The one who hates the office and for whom it is a jail continues to slog in the office. The one who wants to get married and have been praying to get married remains single and the one who wants to remain single gets married. I wish everyone gets a correct life of what they want soon. These are really dark times. So in all this mess, I had forgotten to make payment to Digital Ocean. And they deleted my site after 3 weeks of non-payment. I had a huge heart attack. You can learn more about marriage counseling if you’re struggling with your married life.

My blog is huge, I have a lot of content and it was an unexpected disaster. I remember we had enabled Updraftplus plugin on our wordpress sometime to take backups every month. We went to Google Drive to quickly check the last backup date. It was on May 8th, which was after my last blog post in April. But still we’re not sure how many previous months have been backed up. Did we enable only last 3 months backup? Will images be backed up? Will themes and plugins be backed up? We wish we had spent more time focusing on backup of entire site and entire droplet in Digital Ocean ‘coz as the blog is growing, it becomes really important to manage your content.

We spent lots of sleepless nights to get our website back again. We had to create a new droplet in Digital Ocean and start the installation all over again. Imagine installing everything again from scratch. Created a droplet with latest Ubuntu. And have to do some basic configuration in Linux to start working on it. Then had to install Apache, Mysql, Php, WordPress and had to configure every damn thing from scratch. Then we had to download all the backup files from Google Drive to our local. We were using mobile data and we got some special Circles.Life data plan to do all this work.

Then we were facing issues with adding our domain name ‘www.ibeautyspy.com’ to our new droplet. For which we had to contact Digital Ocean support many times. They were slow in replying. We had to wait like 2-3 days for their replies while we were all biting our nails here. I mean, it’s our domain name that we have registered and got for ourselves on Namecheap. And I didn’t understand why Digital Ocean was blocking us from adding that. Then finally they resolved the issue after asking us to prove that it’s our domain name by making us adding some TXT record. Sometimes I can’t understand what seriously is happening in my life. This is the weirdest experience ever. So we added back our domain name.

Then we had to buy some plugin for the migration/restore process. Spent so much money in all this stuff. Then finally praying to God, we pressed the Restore button. We weren’t sure how much was going to get restored. We pressed the Restore button and went to sleep, it was taking a long time. Good that we got the special Airtel pack. After some time when I woke up, the restore operation was complete. But there were some errors. I hit my site IBeautySpy.com praying and praying that everything will be up. To our surprise, all the blog posts were there. Ya! From the beginning. All the posts from my first post. But, but, none of the images were there. Again we got another rude shock.

We went through the errors in the log for a long time. Apparently, Apache had timeout which we had to increase and do the restore once again. So again uploaded all the backup files and again did restore. Still it was failing. Then we increased the timeout in multiple places. After which we tried restore again. And loo and behold! Everything came back! All posts and images, themes, plugins and everything. Even the ads! Oh my goodness! At that moment, I felt like God has touched my blog. We really jumped up. It felt like a complete restore of the entire website. Seriously we didn’t expect Updraftplus could do this much. Am still thanking God everyday for making me overcome my huge jumbo size disaster. I think God really has helped me a lot with every problem in my life and my life has improved a lot with God’s Midas touch! So this is the whole story of how we bought our website IBeautySpy back up again after lot of hard work and technical confrontations.

What we need from you guys (our followers and subscribers)?
We have got messages from so many followers asking what happened to our blog, why it’s not opening. We had told that it has got deleted due to non-payment and we were working to restore it. Our followers were really shocked to know this. Many of them offered to help in whatever way they can. Some followers messaged saying they were opening the site every morning to check if it is up. After we installed wordpress and added our domain, they had got an email saying ‘This is the first post’. They thought this is it and they were willing to write some posts for our blog. We told we were now working to restore the backup. The next morning we got many messages saying ‘Congratulations Archana! Your blog is up again. We are so excited!’. Waking up to such messages! I was really thankful to have such followers and friends in my life. A huge thanks to all my followers, subscribers and friends, ‘coz it’s only with all your support and encouragement, we were able to do all this. Thank you so much for supporting me in this blogging journey!

Now we would like to ask a small favor from you guys. We need your help in testing if everything is working fine as we have restored the entire site now. Please help by doing the following and report if you get any errors:
* Open some random posts and see if they are loading, if images are loading.
* Click on some random links to see if the links are working.
* Comment on any post to see if comments are working.
* See in menu bar if menus are loading and clickable.
* Also try subscribing to my blog using a new email address and see if you getting any error. After few days when I will post a new post, let me know if you get email notification in new email inbox.
Let me know if you are getting error or invalid URL anywhere. You can email to ibeautyspy@gmail.com .

That’s all guys. This is the story of how I lost my huge blog and I managed to get it all back. Basically what has saved us is our Updraftplus backup. We have come to realize how important backups are and we are planning to take a backup of our droplet also to prevent such kind of situations in future. And also we are planning to take backups of our other software items like laptop backup, phone backup. We would recommend all of you guys to take advantage of this Coronavirus situation and use the time to take backups of your important devices. Let me know if you would like us to share some links of how to take backups.

Thank you all for all your support and encouragement. Browse my blog now and be happy!

Also checkout:
* Let’s SetUp Your Life 14 Days Event – Module 3 – Rebuilding – Task #14 – Move Around, Be Active – Fitness Task
* Let’s SetUp Your Life 14 Days Event – Module 3 – Rebuilding – Task #13 – Play – Life Task
* Let’s SetUp Your Life 14 Days Event – Module 3 – Rebuilding – Task #12 – Create Your Dream Board / Bucket List – Life Task