If I could insert a face palm emoji here I would.
I just finished recovering my webpage. Manually.
In case you don’t know what that means, here it is:
- Hope and pray your page can be recovered.
- Look through every folder to see if there’s a backup you did didn’t know about.
- Enter ticket with page host.
- Go back and forth with page host four times.
- Resign self to the fact that the page can’t be recovered.
- Take screenshots of page contents.
- Highlight and copy any post text still in my internet cache
- Paste it all into a separate document.
- Delete all pages and posts that are still in the website folders
- Delete/uninstall WordPress
- Sigh heavily. Try to avoid crying.
- Reinstall WordPress.
- Go through all the initial configuration that I did originally.
- Make all new blog posts using the text I was able to recover.
This has taken me about six (6) hours total.
That’s 6 hours NOT spent getting my awesome password generator app actually posted on the website. Also didn’t get any other school assignments done either. On top of that, I couldn’t recover all of my blog posts. Two of my best posts are gone forever!
If anyone should have known the importance of having a good backup, it was me.
So, here’s some advice for others out there who have decided to post content online.
- Write your blog posts using a word processor and save them as you type. Once you have a post you’re happy with simply copy and paste it to your website.
- Backup your webpage using one of the tools provided by your domain hosting service. If you don’t know how to save a backup, put in a ticket to ask.
- Keep your backups separate from your usual files. I’m just lucky the images on my site were also on my phone. I still had to gather others from their web-based repositories. If I had saved everything in one location, it would have taken even longer than six hours to recover.