The migration from andyc.wordpress.com is now complete. All articles have been migrated. All comments have been lovingly preserved. All the internal links have been fixed (by hand) in a long and painstaking process. Robots and spiders are crawling all over the new site.
The only omission was a handful of WordPress images. I realised that I was a little hasty in deleting my old WordPress blog otherwise I could have easily retrieved these files too. Or a simple ‘wget’ of the complete site would have done the job.
Time for a checkpoint, I think. Activate the WP-DB Backup plugin and take a full backup of the MySQL database. Export the complete blog (posts and comments) to XML. As for Charlie - well that’s yours truly for not taking a checkpoint earlier.
I decided I didn’t like the format of the ' Related Posts’ plugin and uninstalled it. However, when I reversed the database changes, I inadvertently deleted two key WP tables instead of column attributes. This idiotic error broke my blog. Totally.
So I was forced to delete my shiny, new WordPress installation and database, and repeat the whole migration process again (including the time consuming and painstaking change to all internal links) from my local WordPress installation. Lucky I took that copy otherwise I would have been really stuck.
Still, I am getting pretty good at the migration from hosted to hosting WordPress now and, finally, I understand the importance of backups.