Starting Over (or Backup!, Backup!, Backup!)

25 September 2007 by David H. Sundwall | 3 comments

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Mine is not a new story, but a sad one that still must be told from time to time.  You hear of another’s brush with disaster and the resulting clarion call to learn from their mistakes and backup your data.  But there’s always someone who does not heed such calls and must experience the bitter loss for himself.

I just installed Wordpress 2.3 and somehow nuked my database. I had backed up my files but failed to backup my database. Not smart.

I’m still looking into recovering the database but in the likelihood that it is beyond hope, are they any suggestions to recover posts other than Google cache and Archive.org’s wayback machine?

UPDATE: 28 Sept - All systems go!  With some help from my server host and some major googling and trial and error I was able to rescue the lost posts.  Whew!  Hopefully a lesson was learned.

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3 comments

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25 September 2007 at 11:26 am

J. Stapley

Your server host should be able to do it. But you will need to put your old files back up to access it.

25 September 2007 at 2:22 pm

Tim Knell

here’s a suggestion i just thought of. it’s messy, but as a last resort…
people who subscribe to your blogs will have the content in their reader since the time they subscribed. so you could ask people who subscribe to your blogs to return the content.

i agree with the first comment though. the server host will/should have backups of your stuff.

good luck!

25 September 2007 at 2:58 pm

admin

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have reached out to the server host as my first and last hope, but that is still pending.

I subscribe to my own feed to make sure its working but I was already able to get most major posts of the last month through Google cache. A cache search seemed strangely selective.

Overall, I can live with what I have recovered, but what a dumb mistake.