What to do when your Blog is Destroyed and All the Posts are Lost
What to do when your Blog is Destroyed & All the Posts are Lost
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For many bloggers this is the unthinkable. Months or years of work can be lost when your blog is destroyed and all the posts are lost. How can this happen you ask? There are plenty of ways:
1. Accidental un-installation of software
2. A disk failure
3. A virus or hacker on the server
4. A transfer to a new blog host gone wrong
5. A disgruntled employee
6. And many many other possibilities
I recently had a long time blogger contact me in tears because she had accidentally un-installed her Wordpress software.
In fact I recently had a long time blogger contact me in tears because she had accidentally un-installed her Wordpress software. All of her posts were gone. The first thing you should do in a situation like this is to contact your web site host and ask them to restore your site from a recent backup. This can sometimes be problematic because backups do not always work and some hosts may have a backup that is one to three months old. In this case this web host DID NO BACKUPS WHATSOEVER. The web host said “Sorry you are screwed”. It may appear that you have very few options but actually you have quite a few.
First, take a look at your phpMyAdmin in Cpanel to see if your databases are still in tact.
If the database is intact you have two options (primarily for Wordpress but variations would work with other blog software):
1. Re-install Wordpress and try to edit the config file to use the database correctly (not as easy as it sounds)
2. Use phpMyAdmin to Export wp_comments, wp_links, wp_posts, and wp_postmeta and them import these records into a new installation with a new database. This is the option I recommend. If you have Fantastico you can install a new version of Wordpress complete with a new database in just a few clicks. When exporting make sure you select “Add DROP TABLE”, and “Complete inserts”. This is the option I used to successfully and quickly restore the blog of my friend with the bad host.
But what if the database is completely gone?
1. If your database is also gone then things can get a little more complicated. If your blog has been around for awhile and you have a ping service setup you should be able to find most of your posts in their entire text at Technorati. Searching for a domain, viewing that blog and then selecting “view all” should do the trick. I have used my blog as an example. You can clearly see over 34 pages of summarized results. Clicking on the title of the post brings up the whole post all on the Technorati server.
2. You can probably use any RSS indexing site that your blog pings including Feedburner and the like. This should allow you to find at least some of your content.
Other options include:
3. Google caching of your pages and Yahoo site explorer (but don’t wait to long)
4. And even the Internet Archive can usually provide some content from older sites.
5. There are probably a few other ways I have missed. Please share them here in the comments of this post.
The most important thing is to:
1. Not panic. It will be okay and you should be able to recover some information.
2. Go through the above restoration steps.
3. Change your web host in future to one that does make verifiable backups.
4. Backup your blog regularly using a Wordpress backup or a free/paid service like BlogBackupOnline. Note: it is free to backup even daily multiple blogs but you have to upgrade to a paid plan to create a file that you can easily import into Wordpress to do a restoration.
5. Create a good disaster recovery plan.
Good luck and play it smart.