The bane and blessing of software: updates

My quest to add even more luster to my shiny, very part-time blog ended in a small disaster after I updated to the latest version of WordPress.

This is yet another sad tale in the ongoing narrative of new vs. old in the realm of hardware and software: Before stepping up to the latest and greatest, weigh the benefits and cost of doing so.

Of course, I didn’t do that. I just wanted the new thing and I didn’t want to read even short summaries of what had changed. And that nag at the top of my dashboard was killing me, man, killing me.

Well. The adventure, then: I continually had a mystifying error that informed me of some kind of upload limit when I tried to automatically upgrade. Ah, sadness. Even my usual backup to WordPress’s baked-in automatic upgrader, the automatic upgrade plugin, failed. So I had to, yech, actually upload files using FTP. It is my wish no one else ever has to do this.

What I didn’t expect was a wiping out of many, many old uploaded files when I took this desperate action. I think I misunderstood the command I gave Transmit. I told it to replace old files, not wipe out ones in the folders already there … but evidently if you replace a folder, it will not retain any files within it, even if they have different file names from the new folder you are uploading.

End result: Goodbye to almost all of my photos, except those displayed via embed code.

Unless there is a must-have security update, I will not be updating my WordPress blog again.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.