Yesterday, as I working to set up WordPress on my site… I suddenly discovered that all my files got reverted to a state about three days old!

I didn’t realize there was any change management in effect.   In fact, I think there isn’t.  Anyhow, this meant WordPress got reverted to it’s freshly installed state, forgetting all the posts I had imported, the posts I had just written, and all my settings. My home page got changed back to the 4/28 version.  At least my uploaded WordPress templates didn’t get erased.

Now what could possibly have caused such an event without me knowing it? Here’s the suspects:

• Wordpress - perhaps there’s a reset button I triggered?
• CPanel - did somehow the file manager decide to back out of a few changes?
• SmartFTP - maybe it decided to sync my computer’s files to the server without me intending that?
• HostGator - obviously they could have reverted files to a previous day, although I can’t imagine why

None of these seem likely, so I’m stumped. What I can say is that a well designed collaborative system wouldn’t have done this.

In a collaborative system, if my action led to the erasure of 3 days work, the system would be aware of this and make sure I was aware also. I don’t mean something as stupid as a dialog box asking “Are you sure you want to do this?” on it. There are much more informative methods. The system could show explicitly the files to replaced. It could provide an easy way to backup the old files in case I didn’t like the results. UNDO would be an option.

As far as I can tell, none of the above programs even think to do this kind of stuff.  In fact, they weren’t designed to think.  They aren’t aware of the impact operations they are performing. Rather, they were programmed to just do a set of tasks, and not worry about anything else.  Like Users.