Last night I performed an update for wordpress, and promptly broke the web site. At first i wasn’t sure what the issue was, just that it was something with the way the site was parsing the layout information. Fundamentally the site was working, but not displaying everything properly. I was able to go back to last months full backup and pull out the core files that I expected to be the culprit. After running comparisons on those files I was able to find the one that was causing the issue. The culprit was one file, formatting.php, located in the wp-includes directory. Thanks to running the monthly full backups I was able to bring back a working copy of the file and fix the issue. This is just one very good example of why performing routine back ups is so important. Kind of interesting that this very thing, ensuring proper backups of data, is one of my core responsabilities at work.