When my database crashed mid-upload over a curious squirrel

The afternoon sun was slipping behind the gum trees when I spotted the little visitor. A bushy-tailed critter, completely out of place in a suburb where brushtail possums usually run the show, was tugging at a peanut I had set out for the lorikeets. I dashed inside, started recording, and knew within seconds the clip was gold. Then I tried to upload it, and the whole server coughed, blinked, and refused to play nice.

If you have ever watched a promising bit of footage get swallowed by a backend error, you already know the sinking feeling. My dashboard froze at ninety-two percent, then my entire site went down. What started as a wholesome moment with a rogue squirrel turned into a weekend of troubleshooting. This is the story of what broke, how I patched it back together, and what I now do differently whenever I want to share animal content from the bush.

The setup and the uninvited star

Spring mornings around my part of Australia tend to bring the strangest mix of visitors onto the lawn. Most days I am dodging magpies and watching rainbow lorikeets squabble over the grevillea. On this particular arvo, however, something completely unfamiliar wandered in. It had a thick rust-coloured coat, a flicking tail, and the casual confidence of an animal that had clearly been around people before.

Squirrels are not native here, which made the sighting even more memorable. Local wildlife carers like WIRES sometimes get calls about escaped pets, and this one looked like it had been hand-raised. I propped my phone against a terracotta pot, switched to slow-motion, and started capturing the moment it stuffed the peanut into its cheeks. Twenty-three seconds of pure backyard magic, already earning its place in my unusual visitors post.

When the upload refused to cooperate

I trudged inside, plugged the phone in, and queued the file for upload. The clip was around four hundred megabytes because I had filmed it in a higher frame rate than usual. The progress bar crawled along, hit forty percent, then eighty, then froze. The dashboard went white. Seconds later I refreshed and got the dreaded blank screen telling me the site could not reach the database.

There is something quietly devastating about watching a perfectly normal task fail at the worst possible moment. I had a video of a once-in-a-lifetime animal encounter and was instead staring at a stack trace I did not understand. My first worry was whether the footage itself had been corrupted by the failed transfer, since I had not yet copied it anywhere else.

Reading the error logs like a map

Once the panic settled, I opened the error logs through my hosting control panel. Rows of red text scrolled past: connection timeouts, aborted queries, and a recurring warning about the maximum allowed packet size being exceeded. The pattern was clear. A single large file upload had been hammering the database worker, exhausting its memory limit, and forcing the whole service to restart in an endless loop.

I cross-referenced the timestamps with my own upload attempts and everything lined up. Each retry made things worse, because half-completed chunks of the upload sat in temporary folders, eating disk space and blocking new connections. Cleaning up the half-written leftovers became the priority before I touched anything else.

Disk space and storage headaches

A big part of my recovery routine involved checking obvious limits first. My plan through a local provider on the NBN gave me a sensible amount of storage, but I had been piling up raw gameplay captures and old anime screencaps for months. Add a four-hundred-megabyte video trying to write into a queue, and the disk filled faster than I expected. Storage on Australian shared hosting can be tight compared with overseas providers, making regular housekeeping almost a civic duty.

Reclaiming space turned into an afternoon of its own. Old raw clips from past posts, several gigabytes of cached thumbnails from mobile visitors, and a forgotten folder of tabletop game sessions all went into the bin. By the time I was done, the dashboard had room to breathe and the database worker finally stopped tripping over itself.

Bandwidth and the NBN reality

Bandwidth was a secondary concern but only barely. Uploading during peak evening hours, when the household was streaming sport and the kids were watching videos, throttled the connection enough to keep stalling the transfer. Starting a heavy upload during the arvo rush is asking for trouble. Quiet mornings, before everyone wakes, turned out to be the safest window for shifting large media.

I also learnt to keep an eye on the upload queue itself rather than the page in front of me. Just because the browser looked idle did not mean the file had finished writing to the staging area. A sensible retry strategy and a hard ceiling on how many simultaneous transfers I would attempt at once saved me a second full-blown outage later that week.

Patching the backend and reclaiming the footage

Once I had cleared the temp folders, raised the upload limit, and trimmed around thirty gigabytes of unused backups, the database finally came back online. The page loaded, the dashboard responded, and I breathed again. Only then did I check whether the squirrel footage had survived. It had, having been written to a staging folder rather than the main library. I copied it onto a second drive, then queued a fresh upload for the next morning.

Resisting the urge to rebuild the whole site from scratch while stressed was harder than any of the actual fixes. Instead, I made small, testable changes one at a time and checked the error logs after each. The blog came back faster, and the lesson stuck more clearly than if I had nuked the entire installation.

Uploading the clip and what I took away

A few days later the video finally sat at the top of my animal archive. Viewers around the country wrote in wondering where they might spot a squirrel of their own, confirming that peculiar wildlife moments travel well. I had a working blog, a leaner storage footprint, and a clearer sense of what to do when a big upload goes sideways.

The whole saga left me with three habits I now keep permanently. I trim old media every few weeks rather than letting it pile up. I schedule large transfers for off-peak hours when the NBN is least congested. And I always make a second copy of any footage before it leaves the camera. None of that matters as much as the memory of that cheeky squirrel carting off a peanut while my server melted down in the background.