A couple of days back one of my Twitter friends, @rivahratt tweeted how the MySQL database of his Wordpress blog crashed and his webhost (a free hosting service) told him they cannot help him since he is not a PRO user. This made me ask few questions -
What if your database crashed and you have no backup whatsoever?
What if a file corrupted while upgrading your Wordpress?
What if Blogger.com accidentally deleted your blog together with the backup copy?
Well, if something like this has happened to you right now, don’t lose hope. There are few ways to recover your deleted blog’s articles automatically or manually, depending on your preference and time.
1. Recover your Deleted Blog Posts from Google cache
Assuming you have your blog posts indexed on Google, go to Google search and look for “site:yoursitename.com“. This will return all the pages indexed by Google. Below each article, you will find a link to “cached” version of the article. Click on that and copy the whole content. This is a very tedious process and be ready to put in loads of manual effort. Brian cook has a detailed article explaining this procedure.
2. Using Warrick – Automatic Blog Recover Tool
Instead of manually copy pasting each and every cached article, you can have a look at Warrick. It is an automatic blog recovery web application that lets you reconstruct any lost website (or single web page) automatically. Simply type the URL of the web site and Warrick will let you know via email once the recover process is over. The tool is essentially a web crawler that scans and collects missing web pages from all the four web repositories – Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo. If a web page is found in more than one web repository, Warrick saves the page with the most recent date.
3. Using the Firefox Cache to Recover a Blog Post
If you are running a wordpress blog, you would like to read this article from WpHackr on how to use the Firefox cache to recover a blog post. Mind you, this is not the easiest way at all, its lots of hassles but still can be used as a last resort.
4. recover the posts from the RSS feed
This is something very logical and easy. If you have been publishing your full blog posts as RSS feed you can go back to feedBurner and start digging through the older feeds and recover the individual blog posts. Scrape through your own posts!!
what do you think of these ideas? Do you have an alternative / better ways? How often you take the backup of your blog?
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April 3rd, 2009 at 2:56 am
You have an excellent list here man! I had never heard of Warrick and it sounds a tool to be of an at most need! Thanks for this one!
stratosgs last blog post..Member Of The Month: March
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April 3rd, 2009 at 11:35 am
You missed out WayBack Machine
Hariharakumars last blog post..Impress Twitter Followers with Twitter DMer
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April 3rd, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Nice info raju ,I will try these if I have to recover any deleted posts from my blog.
venkats last blog post..7 Ways to Check PageRank of any Webpage Instantly
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April 4th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
I think the most ideal and easy is using the RSS feed trick. But like Hariharakumar said, you missed out wayback machine. Nice list though.
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April 11th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I take backup of my blog only when I upgrade my wordpress blog to the latest version.
Steve Yus last blog post..M File Anti-Copy Protects Your Files Against Copy, Delete and Rename Actions
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April 13th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Actually, the wayback machine is referenced in the Tool Warrick which looks at the Internet Archive.
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