config files and htdocs lost, recommended names and locations

[ohmpr]

hi,
I've been setting up an OpenBSD web server as i have time, over several months now. I had httpd and relay setup and serving my php and nim web apps. It's been a while since i've even looked at it, but yesterday (in a careless whim, evidently) i thought i'd upgrade it to 7.0 from 6.9 so i quickly read the upgrade guide and ran sysupgrade. Everything went fine from what i could tell over ssh, but now httpd, relayd and mysqld fail to start. Investigating, i see /etc/httpd.conf, /etc/relayd.conf, and, for example, /var/www/htdocs/myapp1, /var/www/htdocs/myapp2 are all gone.

Also, somehow, it looks like i never backed up any of this...

So, besides my mistake (or sabotage from inter-dimensional doppelganger?) in not backing up, i'm wondering if i'm missing something about how OpenBSD handles release upgrades in regards to how it handles config files, htdocs and any other data. I assumed OpenBSD would leave any customized, or manually created, config files alone, along with my htdocs. Maybe i'm supposed to have config files in some other location besides /etc, or named in some particular way? Though, i still can't imagine why it would delete htdocs data...

I also don't even know for sure that this data loss happened during the upgrade, because i didn't even think to check the then current status prior to running sysupgrade. I know, another "BOOO!" to me...

so, long story short, i'm just wondering what i am supposed to do differently (besides having a backup) so i won't lose my configs and htdocs in the future.

thanks

[jggimi]

I'm sorry for your loss. Of data.

It happens to all of us. Which is why everyone eventually backs their stuff up -- so it won't happen to us again. And the truly paranoid among us test recovery procedures, to make sure we can get our data back.

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I'm thinking the root cause may have been through the execution of sysmerge(8) -- either when it ran automatically by rc.firsttime(8) after the upgrade, or your interactive responses to it if you ran it manually.

The upgrade produces logs that are sent to root mail, so see if there is anything in root's inbox and review those logs carefully for any clues.

[ohmpr]

thanks for your response. everything looks fine to me in the mail/logs.

So, i'm not supposed to have to do anything special for config files, nor htdocs, to keep them from being erased or written over?

[TronDD]

I dont know what happened but /var/backups might have your old config files.

Config files should not have been deleted unless you told sysmerge to do it.

Not sure how htdocs would have been touched unless you had it as another partition mounted there and your fstab was changed and it's simply not mounted.

[ohmpr]

sysmerge only asked about sshd and that still works. /var is the only var partition and it's mounted. thanks for that idea, though.

I'm starting to think this happened prior to the upgrade and i just didn't notice.