How my moodle DB backup process saved me, again.

Last week about 10:30 in the am, I decided to give my troublesome moodle DB upgrade another shot.  I have a test environment where I restore the DB to and then move moodle code into and out of.  Recently, I accidentally deleted the config.php file from the root.  I copied the one from the production instance into the test instance.

I updated the wwwroot and dataroot values BUT, somehow, terrible, MISSED THE dbname property.  It still had the production db listed.

OOPS

I started the upgrade about 10:30, fortunately, I also backed up the production DB and restored it to the test instance.

Some time after this my colleagues emailed me and asked if I knew what was going on, why the live db was upgrading. OYE.  blood pressure from 80/120 to 120/160.........

It is hard to think clearly when the BP is high.  Take deep breaths, ask your colleague to come down and help you think through what is going on.

After a bit more fusing around and actually walking away from the problem for a bit, I was able to spot my problem in the config file.  Once I knew what I had done, I was able to restore the DB from 10:30.  After restoring the DB, I messaged me customers and said everything was fine.  BUT, in reality, we lost about 3 hrs of data that day.  After everything calmed back down, I was able to look in the site logs and see a skip of over 3 hrs.  No harm no foul.  If someone complained to us about losing something that they did, like a quiz attempt or uploaded file, then I would have set about trying to recover data from my corrupted old live DB.

That did not happen, so I say again, no harm no foul.

Moral of the story? Pay attention to the $CFG->dbname value in your config.php file PRIOR to starting a DB upgrade.