I'll get this right eventually

3rd time's the charm, right? Why is this my 3rd round of resetting the same site? Mainly due to me messing around with the configuration a bit too much. This time, I wanted to try and implement other layout builders; however, layout builders may conflict. In my case, they did, I couldn't delete the old one, and trying to delete the nodes manually from the database is not a good idea.

Ok. So with the mistake out of the way, what exactly did go wrong, and how could I have recovered the site?

What went wrong: Backups.

On all commercial software projects, there are backups made on a regular, frequent, basis. Its common practice so in case something does go wrong, the changes can be reverted quickly. In this case, this website is mainly for tinkering, but morphed into a blog site as well. Because there was no initial consideration for a regular backup process, no thought had been put into it over the site's lifespan of only a few days. It hadn't been long enough to really consider setting up backups, but it had been long enough that it stung a bit when I realised that the current state was unrecoverable without backups.

How could I have recovered the site?

If I HAD backups, all I would have needed to do was restore them. For the current system, it probably would have required a database backup at least. A module backup would have been good as well.