Frustrated by inaccessible MySQL Data :(

Ugh, so somehow (sigh!) my old Ubuntu Server that I was running this blog on, with Wordpress became corrupt. Even getting Ubuntu to boot properly took an hour of googling. So after that I finally get into my old profile to find MySQL won't start. I tried following the logs /var/log/mysql for hours and searching and trying to start sudo service mysqld start error over and over and over. Many reinstalls, all with the same result. Without being able to start mysql I can't access my fscking blog entries. Apparently mysql has them locked in an unopenable post.ibd file. Wonderful. So it was an incredibly frustrating day of chasing my tail to accomplish nothing. I was able to grab the media from the missing posts, but without the post content they are kinda useless. So frustrating! I have, what I think is the data but no way to access it.

Trying a final hail mary by installing Wordpress on another system and swapping the posts.ibd files. I'm sure it will work. (sigh...it likely won't) I feel quite defeated by this. I spent hours googling and reading only to find it seems pointless. Being fscked by software is the reason I'm abandoning Wordpress. Yes, I should have backed things up better but I shouldn't be locked out of my data because of it when I have the data.

So my blog entries from June 2023 to Sept 2023 may be lost forever. Sigh.

HAHAHA!!

HEX EDITOR TO THE RESCUE!

I didn't need a perfect recreation of the database, just to be able to read the file... And bam! Hex editing wp_posts.ibd works...! I can see my posting text! So I'm slowly going to copy and paste the data over. WOO! Small victory!

WOO! The missing posts have been recovered! They may not be revised versions of the posts, but they are pretty close. So... now on to the long grind of two decades of posts. *cough*