from horror story to miracle

TL;DR: Updraft REALLY DOES what it says, out of the box. I was able to completely restore a wordpress+woocommerce site, after deleting it multiple times, due to a severe crash that corrupted my original database.

Long story: my site became unresponsive after disabling a plugin yesterday, and it sent me into a spiral of trying to turn on and off plugins via myphpadmin. Needless to say, there came a point when I decided I would trust the backup and just wipe my entire site directory clean.

Unfortunately, every time (and I did this seven times) I started a fresh wordpress site, the backup restore stalled about 3/4 in, and I would just be left staring at the white screen of death.

Initially I was PISSED at updraft for not working (it seemed that way). Also, when I did have a somewhat successful restore, it wasn’t able to connect to the database, and I still had to manually input credentials into myphpadmin, which is just not user friendly at all and definitely not what was promised.

HOWEVER, today about 12 hours into this absolute mess, I checked my other sites which are all on the same host (IONOS US) and none of them were responsive… which made me realize it probably wasn’t a plugin incompatability after all, but something to do with my host…

The coincidence was very unfortunate that I experienced the total crash right after disabling a plugin, the same plugin that was returning errors while my sister was checking debug and convinced something was wrong with that plugin… that’s why I didn’t think it could’ve been anything BUT a plugin-related issue.

To wrap this up, Updraft was working fine EVERY TIME but my host, which automatically installs a plugin and activates it with every new wordpress install, actually had a bugged out plugin and didn’t report it to any of the wordpress users. It made every wordpress site stall, but only about 30 minutes after a fresh install of the WP environment… so, every single sign was super confusing, and I wouldn’t have figured it out except that I have multiple sites on the host and they all were showing the same symptoms.

I’m so so so grateful that Updraft worked FLAWLESSLY even despite me abusing my FTP and databases with constant deletions and reinstatements over the past 24 hours. this has been an absolute odyssey, but I’m happy to report the site is back with everything in tact. Thank you, thank you Updraft, for being a hedge against crazy situations like this!!!

Also, a lesson for everyone else: CHECK WITH YOUR HOST, they f*ck up and don’t report it!