Beep, beep, beep. Back it up!

Well, it’s been an interesting week so far. Coming off of vacation always leaves me a little disoriented. Unfortunately, that fogginess totally effed up my blog on Sunday night. I’ll start off by asking, when was the last time you backed up your blog? Go ahead and do it now. I’ll wait…

Ok, so now let’s get into the meat of this story. We had a red eye flight from Honolulu to Houston Saturday night and Sunday was a bit of a blur of sleep and laundry. But I had so many blog post ideas in my head that I needed to get written. I sat down Sunday afternoon to knock out a couple of posts and was pretty stoked at my progress. Well, later that evening, I don’t know what I was thinking, but I somehow deleted one of the posts. And then I panicked. It wasn’t a stellar post, really, but it was something pressing that I had wanted to write about for a while. I was so sad it was gone and I couldn’t figure out how to find it again.

The next morning, I emailed my host provider an asked if they could do a 24 hour restore from their backup files. They were really quick to comply, which was awesome, until they completely jacked up my site. Well, to be fair, cPanel jacked it up, but still. The entire site reverted to October 11, 2012 and everything since was gone. That included all of my images, posts, comments and even my new Genesis theme and redesign. Gone. And guess who has never backed up their site? Yeah, this girl.

Anywhoo, I put a call out on Twitter and FB and thank heavens for my friend Erin as she had several of my posts in her reader still. She even had all of the links for the remaining ones. You have no idea how incredibly thankful I am for her. And Erica hooked me up proper with a reinstall of my Genesis theme and a few other tweaks. Angels – both of them.

So, you may be wondering what I did to get everything restored. It was actually easier than I thought and I was able to repost close to 30 blogs and 100+ images in about 3 hours. I was able to use the direct links from each post that Erin sent from her reader and pull each one from Google’s cache. How? So very easy:

1. In Chrome, type “cache:http://www.yoururl.com/yourposttitle/”
2. Hit enter
3. Viola! The page magically appears!
4. Right click on the post’s content
5. Select “view source”
6. Copy your post’s code (I only pulled the HTML from where the actual text started inside the <p></p> tags, including image anchors, and ignored all the codey stuff above and below that)
7. Paste it into the text view on WordPress
8. Add in the same title you used before
9. Change the post date to the original date
10. Hit Publish
11. Have a bottle of wine. Really. A whole bottle. Maybe through a straw.

And that is how it went down. More than 30 times. But my blog is back in business and I’m slightly hung over (worth it).

Just a side note: not all pages can be found in Google’s cache so please don’t rely on this method if it is at all avoidable.

And also, back up your databases frequently.

Have you done that yet? No? Go now. Yes? Go do it again.

XOXO