My Radio Upstreaming Disaster

Somehow I managed to destroy almost a month's worth of Radio blogging. What follows is a painful description of what happened and what I think I did to cause my loss.

A few days ago I had used an external Web Service in my Radio log (external because it made an xml-rpc call to a web server on the Internet, not my local machine) and this morning I noticed that my Radio log was deathly slow.

As my pages loaded, I noticed the browser would seem to hang as it tried to access an IP address... the same IP address where the Web Service was running.

The wait made my Radio Log unusable, so I decided to eliminate the calls to the external server by editing the text in the weblogData.root table.

Finding the stories that had the call to the external server was not hard, and changing the text in those stories in the weblogData.root database was easy.

Unfortunately, whatever I did broke my Radio.

I didn't panic; I searched the Userland discussion pages and documentation and even though I didn't find an answer, I still felt that my data could be recovered.

In the process of trying different things, I tried doing the "Save a Copy" routine and I downloaded a new Radio.root (I didn't know the problem was with weblogData.root). However, something I did went really wrong.

As it turns out, my weblogData.root file became corrupted. It is still almost a megabyte in size, and nothing I have tried has been able to get Radio to open it.

I thought that as a last resort I would still be able to recover my html files that had been upstreamed to the server. What I didn't expect was that Radio was busy working in the background, upstreaming new files for each day with error messages all over them.

I still have my original Radio installation on my hard drive. Maybe someday I will find a way to recover my data. Maybe not. The funny thing is, it doesn't really bother me too much right now. Sure, there are a few posts that I remember and I know I am going to miss, but I saw Radio as a learning experience and I expected to make some mistakes. But I didn't think I would ever make a mistake that would delete so much data so quickly.

So I start again today, with a new, clean Radio slate.