I’d drafted 2 blogs yesterday – one about a portable monitor and another about Firesticks. This morning I decided to be brave and update WordPress to 5.5 (I’d tested two other sites yesterday which both worked perfectly) but it failed and I’ve lost (the) blogs.

To be fair, it’s my own fault for (a) not taking snapshots before running the update (I’d assumed the overnight ones worked) and (b) not checking the said snapshots before I decided to roll back. Especially as I woke to a non-running FreeNAS server this morning!

We had some pretty big electrical storms during the night, and I’m not sure if that caused things to power down, but my office was eerily quiet when I went in this morning as everything connected to the UPS was off. It all started back OK, although I needed to delete some iThemes config from the WordPress jail nginx.conf file as the NGINX service didn’t restart. Having fixed that, and checked everything was running fine, I thought I’d upgrade to 5.5.

The following error stopped the update and meant that I couldn’t get back into my WordPress site from the browser:

Could not create directory.: wp-admin/css/colors/modern

A short Google search suggested it was a permissions issue, but I’d jumped the gun and tried to roll back the previous nights snapshots. I have the database stored in a dataset outside the jail for backup and performance reasons, and while the jail snapshot had completed, the database snapshot was scheduled to run at 05:00 and my machine went down around 03:00.

A real ‘school-boy error’ as after I’d rolled back the database a day further than I really wanted too, I fixed the error straight away by resetting the permissions on the wp-admin folder. I needn’t have rolled back the database at all, or probably the jail, but you live and learn.

Having snapshots are great and have saved my ass so many times, but sometimes it’s too easy to simply roll them back without spending a little more time trying to diagnose the problem. This is one such case which resulted in the lost blogs.

I’ll try and remember what I’d written at some point over the next few days as I thought they were quite interesting, but I start a new job next week so time will be somewhat precious.

Anyway, the moral of the story? Check you have a snapshot before running an upgrade, or even better make a new one at the point just before you do. It takes seconds, and can save hours or days of work!