In all fairness, its not that I believe it is crap, its just that there is so much better ways to update sites. My preference at the moment is:

• Subversion
• Capistrano or Python Fabric
• or SSH and SCP if you don’t want to or cannot use the above

I do understand that if you host sites on a shared host you don’t always have these options and in lots of instances FTP is the only option available to you. I feel your pain :(

I started delving into our parser scripts trying to root out the problem on ground level. Make changes left, right and center. Testing, redo-ing, answering the phone, answering calls on Skype from my sweet love of my life, losing track of what I’ve done and BAM! things are a complete mess…

So, what would be the quickest solution? Start over and do it properly. At least, for me that is sometimes the best option. Now, if you’re having nightmare days, you’ll know when it happens that you bugger shit up so badly that you’ve completely forgot to make backups before you started breaking your months of hard work. Its that sickening sinking feeling…

Fortunately, Subversion (SVN) is not only for keeping revisions of your software, but actually allows you to go back to a snapshot of your code right about where you started doing the dumb stuff. There are a number of ways to recover, although this was what I did as a quick and dirty solution. Took me less than a minute.

Find what the revision number is before you mucked it up.
Export that revision to a different directory.

svn export http://svn.afrigator.com/trunk/ -r 4815

Copy the source file back to your working repository.
Check it in

svn ci -m "Fix the mess I made"

Viola! You’re good to go and start messing it up from scratch again!

Now I do know that the best way to prevent this from happening is to never have it happen in the first place, but hell, if and when it happens, be thankful that you’ve got SVN!