Has Your Blog Been Sucked Down the Google Drain Pipe?

I decided to forgo the post I had ready for this morning to write about something that has very recently affected me.

Last night I signed into one of my WordPress blogs to find about 70% of the posts missing and the ones that remained were so out-of-whack I decided I was better off just deleting them. This wasn’t too much of a bummer because luckily that site is only a personal “blah” blog I write for friends and family. However, that’s not the point. The point is, what if it happened to be this site or some of my other sites.

What if one morning you wake to find all your hard work has been sucked down the Google drain pipe? It can be gooey, hard to move and down right stinks having to travel down that road to content recovery.

Let’s look at some ways to recover lost content:

1. Undelete My Blog Project - This site will basically just access Google’s cache and pull up your content. Unfortunately it doesn’t go back very far. I tried it and the earliest it could recover is a post from January 20th.
2. You can contact your hosting provider to see if they have any backups. They usually do, but it may not go back as far as you’d like.
3. You can use Technorati, or any other feed aggregating service to pull up old posts. Unfortunately these things usually only provide snippets.
4. Hopefully you have a FeedBurner enabled RSS feed with the option to subscribe via email and you’re actually subscribed to it. If that’s the case, you have a backup of every post you’ve ever created sitting happily in your email archives.
5. Find that awesome, albeit creepy, fan of yours that has saved and archived everything you have ever written and take him/her out to lunch.

What you would have to do for most of these options is copy & paste the individual posts into new posts and re-publish (updating image tags, links, and any media is a pain, but at least you have it).

Now let’s look at ways to prevent this:

1. Backup! (There’s many ways to do this)
   • If you’re using WordPress you can use WP-DBManager which provides automatic scheduled backups so you don’t have to worry or even remember.
   • Like I mentioned up top, subscribe to your feeds, especially the email newsletter and archive them in your mail account.
   • If you write your posts in some other program (instead of the online form), don’t delete them after you publish. Save them in a folder on your computer.
2. That’s it, there’s no number 2. ;o)

I hope this helps you if you’ve recently had a mishap or are looking for ways to prevent one.

Anyone else have a similar experience? How do/did/would you recover your work?

Image credit: Ralf Stockmann.