Back from the Brink

I have my weather website running again.  It was a major PITA to get things going.  I am partially to blame for not having a good backup system in place.  But since it is such a hassle to get things working, when I finally do, I'm almost afraid to mess with it.

As previously mentioned, I believe the SD card on the Raspberry Pi failed.  It is actually not that easy to know for sure, but the Pi itself seems OK with another card installed.

So the challenge was to get Weewx up and running again with a new SD card.  I had to reload all of the required software.  Of course the latest version of Weewx was 5.1, and I had been running 4.10.  Here is a list of software I had to load:

• Weewx
• Apache
• DDClient (for dynamic DNS)
• Fswebcam

Settings for those often had to be added, as well as adding some udev rules to workaround the flakey Davis serial to USB converter, setting all kinds of permissions.  Weewx 5 also had some major changes to get used to.  So I spent a ton of time visiting the Weewx website and guides.

Unfortunately, many needed files were on the "bad" microSD card.  I figured I probably could recreate most of what I needed, except for 16 years of weather data stored in a sqlite database.

I tried so many things, I can't remember most of them.  The files I needed could not be read by windows.  I attempted to read the files on the Raspberry Pi using a SD to USB adapter with no luck.  I eventually found some software (and tried many) that would run on Windows such that I could recover some files from the SD card.

Sadly, the main one, the weather database, initially appeared corrupted for both Weewx and SQLite.  Again, I found another tool that "recovered" the database, though this whole process took hours and hours of Google searches and trial-and-error.

Eventually I had a usable database again, but missing some data.  The last few years of data was missing, or partially missing (some months).  Again, I was able to get most of that back.  Still waiting on the image graphs for the last year, not sure when they are generated.

In all, it was the better part of two days work.  I'm no Linux expert, so I basically need to refamiliarize myself to the basics every time I need to delve into it.  

It seems like there is some major problem/failure/etc that happens every couple of years that requires a huge effort to overcome.  At least it hasn't cost me anything but time, so far.