Vent: Lost 8 hours rebuilding a menu when my CMS auto-updated overnight

Was working on a restaurant site in Chicago, had the whole menu laid out perfect with custom pricing tiers. Came back the next morning and the plugin update wiped all my custom CSS and broke the layout. Had to manually redo every single dropdown and hover effect from memory, no backup. Turns out the auto-update setting was on by default and I never checked. Anybody else get blindsided by a silent update like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

dylan_ward14d ago

had the whole menu laid out perfect with custom pricing tiers" - that's the part that got me. I gotta call out that you said "had to redo every dropdown and hover effect from memory, no backup." Just a heads up, even if you didn't have a plugin backup, your host or local machine might have had a cached version. I've been burned before and found out later there was an older copy in my browser cache or my host's auto-backup from two days prior. It's a pain, but next time check those spots before tearing your hair out from scratch.

the_mary13d ago

Yeah for real, browser cache has saved me more times than I'd like to admit. Also some hosts keep a backup even if you didn't set one up yourself, it's worth poking around the cpanel or asking support if they have a recent snapshot before giving up and starting over.

smith.lee13d ago

Found myself in a similar spot once with a client's site and nearly started from scratch before remembering I'd left a browser tab open for days with the inspector tool still showing the old CSS. That cached version saved me a solid 8 hours of work (and a lot of cussing).