If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a professional developer, it is that “TIP” is bad. Never Test In Production! Unfortunately in my case, it was past midnight, I was tired, and I had two query analyzer windows open, one to my local host, and one to my website’s database, both with the same database name

I was testing an installation script that would drop and recreate the Subtext database, and I just happened to run it in the wrong Query Analyzer window. You can imagine my distress as I visited my site to find it pretty much gone.

Fortunately, my hosting provider takes regular backups and they had a backup from four days ago. Once the backup was restored, I went in and carefully recreated four days worth of blog posts with help from my RSS Bandit cache. You see, it’s more than vanity that I subscribe to my own feed.

In case your curious, I used Query Analyzer to reconstruct the posts since the URLs were generated using the ID column (identity) and the DateAdded column. With liberal use of the

> DBCC CHECKIDENT ('blog\_content', RESEED, 3073)

command, I recreated the proper IDs so that existing links to these posts would not break. Unfortunately I lost all comments.