A Dutch saying: A donkey doesn’t hit his head twice against a rock. Well, this donkey does!!

You know that sinking feeling when you realize you’ve made a mistake that’s going to cost you hours of work? I got intimately acquainted with that feeling today, and I’m sharing this story because maybe, just maybe, it’ll save someone else from the same headache.

The Setup: A Simple Permalink Change

It started innocently enough. I was working on my WordPress site, doing some routine maintenance and optimization. One of the tasks on my list was updating the permalink structure to make my URLs more SEO-friendly. It’s a straightforward process, something I’ve done before on other sites. What could go wrong?

Everything. Everything could go wrong.

The Mistake: Forgetting the Golden Rule

Here’s where I made my critical error: I dove straight into the permalink settings and made the changes without hitting that backup button first. You know, the one that sits right there in the dashboard, practically begging to be clicked before any major changes. The one I tell other people to always use. The one I somehow completely forgot about in my eagerness to get the task done.

I updated the permalinks, hit save, and felt that brief moment of satisfaction that comes with checking something off your to-do list.

That satisfaction lasted about thirty seconds.

The Disaster: When Everything Breaks

I refreshed my site to see how the new URLs looked, and my heart dropped. The main page loaded fine, but everything else, every single blog post, every subpage, every carefully crafted piece of content, returned the dreaded “couldn’t find URL” error.

My site had essentially become a one-page website, with everything else lost in digital limbo.

Panic mode activated. I immediately started researching solutions, diving into forums and documentation about WordPress permalink issues. I found several potential fixes involving command line work, updating .htaccess files, checking database configurations, and running various WordPress CLI commands.

The Scramble: Command Line Heroes (That Weren’t So Heroic)

I spent the next few hours trying different approaches:

• Regenerating .htaccess rules
• Checking file permissions
• Running database repairs
• Attempting to manually recreate the permalink structure

Some of these fixes worked temporarily, or seemed to work for certain pages but not others. It was like playing whack-a-mole with URL errors, fix one thing, break another.

The Reality Check: Sometimes You Need to Cut Your Losses

After several hours of increasingly frustrated troubleshooting, I had to face facts. My attempts at heroic command line recovery weren’t working, and I was making the problem not better.

It was time to swallow my pride and restore from backup.

The Recovery: Yesterday’s Backup to the Rescue

Fortunately, I do have automated daily backups running. I restored the site from yesterday’s backup, and within minutes, everything was working perfectly again.

The relief was immense. My site was back, functional, and all my content was accessible.

Well, almost all of it.

The Cost: Three Posts Lost to the Digital Ether

Here’s the kicker: in the time between yesterday’s backup and my permalink adventure, I had written and published three new blog posts.

Those three posts were gone. Not in draft form, not saved anywhere else. Just… gone.

I had to sit there and accept that I would need to recreate that content from scratch, hoping I could remember all the key points and sources I had used.

The Lesson: Backups Aren’t Just for Major Changes

This experience hammered home a lesson I thought I already knew: always backup before making changes, no matter how minor they seem.

Updating permalinks feels like such a small, routine task. It’s the kind of thing you might do while half-watching TV or thinking about what to have for lunch. But the reality is that any change to your site’s core structure has the potential to break things in unexpected ways.

The few minutes it would have taken to create a backup before making the change would have saved me:

• Hours of frustrated troubleshooting
• Three pieces of content that I now need to recreate
• A significant amount of stress and aggravation
• The humbling experience of having to explain to myself why I ignored my own best practices

Moving Forward: Building Better Habits

Going forward, I’m implementing a few new rules for myself:

1. Backup before ANY changes, not just the ones that seem major
2. Document recent posts in a separate location so they’re not entirely dependent on the site database
3. Test changes on a staging site when possible, even for “simple” updates
4. Set reminders in my task management system to backup before specific types of maintenance

As for those three lost posts, I’m committed to recreating them as best I can. While I can’t reproduce them exactly as they were, I’ll do my best to capture the main ideas and insights that made them valuable in the first place. It’s going to take some time to rebuild that content from memory and research, but it’s a small price to pay for this hard-learned lesson.

The Silver Lining: Sharing the Pain

If there’s one positive thing to come out of this experience, it’s this blog post. Sometimes our mistakes make the best teaching moments, and if my frustrating afternoon can prevent someone else from making the same error, then maybe those three lost posts served a purpose after all.

What about you? Have you ever learned a lesson the hard way about backups or website maintenance? Share your stories in the comments—misery loves company, and we can all learn from each other’s digital disasters.

Remember: “The best backup is the one you make before you need it”

Patrick Phang

Donkey