We Deleted Our Database

What better way to kick off our Dev Journey category than with a tale of absolute chaos?

Yep, we managed to delete our database. But hey, nothing teaches you faster than a full-blown disaster, right?

Scaling Pains: Be Ready for Traffic

When building an online service, you have to think ahead. It's not just about writing clean code and deploying features; it's about making sure your infrastructure can handle real-world traffic without breaking.

We learned this the hard way when our service unexpectedly went down after getting hit with way more traffic than we ever anticipated. One day, everything was fine; the next, our servers were melting. We had no autoscaling, our database was struggling, and our app slowed to a crawl. That wake-up call pushed us to rethink our entire infrastructure.

To prevent another meltdown, we decided to move away from our simple Docker + Nginx setup and transition to Kubernetes. The goal? Better resource allocation, automated scaling, and a more resilient system.

So, we spun up our cluster, set up our pods, configured the load balancer, and started migrating our services one by one. Everything was going smoothly... until it wasn’t.

The Backup That Never Was

In the excitement of setting up our new fancy infrastructure, we kind of... forgot something important. Backups.

Yeah, you read that right. We were so focused on getting everything up and running that we never properly configured automated database backups. Of course, we told ourselves, "We'll set them up once we finish the migration." Famous last words.

The Moment of Doom

One fine evening, during some routine cleanups of our old infrastructure, we decided to free up some space by removing unused instances. Somewhere in that process, someone (not naming names, but it was totally us) accidentally wiped out the blog database server.

We stared at the screen for a solid minute, hoping this was some kind of caching issue or a bad joke from the terminal. It wasn’t. The database was gone. Completely.

Luckily, our main database was untouched. But we had just wiped out all the blog articles and tales.

The Desperate Recovery Attempt

Panic mode engaged. We frantically looked for backups. Nope, none. We checked if we had any snapshots or exports lying around. Nothing.

Then, someone had the crazy idea: Google Search Console.

Turns out, Google caches indexed pages. Since our blog content was publicly available, we spent the next two hours manually scraping Google’s cache, piece by piece, reconstructing the lost articles and stories. Not ideal, but it worked (kind of).

Lessons Learned: What Not to Do

If there’s anything you take away from this horror story, let it be this:

1. Always, ALWAYS have backups. Automate them. Test them. Store them in multiple locations. Just do it.

2. Be extra careful with destructive commands. Double, triple-check before running rm -rf or deleting anything in production.

3. Have a rollback plan. Migrations can and will go wrong. Make sure you can roll back without a meltdown.

4. Use proper access control. Maybe don’t let anyone with SSH access go around deleting production servers.

5. Google knows things. Sometimes, it might just save your life (or at least your blog content).

That’s our story. We managed to restore 100% of our content—lesson learned. Now go check out the other articles too. You might find something interesting!