Last night around 9:30pm, I received an urgent call from the editor of launabeachbikini.org. Their website, which is powered by Wordpress, had completely vanished.
Just like on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first thing is: Don’t Panic.
I tried to access the home page with a web browser. Nothing.
I tried to access the admin area with a web browser. Gone.
Then I connected to the server host by ftp. All the wordpress files were in their proper places. This points to some kind of database problem.
Using phpMyAdmin I was able to look at the database tables. Several of the tables had overhead, and the one of the tables was marked “in use”.
Then I recalled something similar happening about seven months ago. At that time, all the posts had vanished and I found the answer in the WordPress.org Support forum How-To and Troubleshooting. Here is the post:
What to do if all posts and pages disappeared
The Wordpress.org forums are the place to find the answers to wordpress questions.
Repair MySQL Tables
It turns out that sometimes the MySQL database can get corrupted. If it tries to update a table and their is not enough room, the tables can become fragmented. This is analogous to disk fragmentation. The tables can be repaired to get rid of the overhead.
Here is a good article explains the problem and how to fix it: How To Quickie: Repair MySQL Tables by Paul Stamatiou.
The steps are:
- Login to phpMyAdmin.
- Select the wordpress database.
- Observe all the database tables.
- Select checkboxes for each table that has an overhead value.
- In the with selected drop down menu, select repair table
- It should report repair status OK
- Look at the tables again. If any table is marked “in use” try to repair that table
This should fix the database. If all the tables cannot be repaired, you will have to restore the wordpress database from a backup. I’ll discuss that in another post.
Thanks and a hat tip to Paul Stamatio who writes a blog about tech news, reviews and guides at paulstamatiou.com
