I have been doing some maintenance on my webhost and cleaning up old sites, databases, files, etc. Earlier today I goofed and nuked the database for this site. But, before I started I used the WordPress export tool in wp-admin to export all my posts, etc. (or so I thought). I had just done a complete database backup via sql 2 days ago so I felt well covered. So, I was not too worried when I had to restore the database from 2 days ago and then import the xml file to restore posts since then. Well, I soon found out that there is a major issue with the WordPress export function and it only had very, very old posts in it. I had a similar experience with my test site. I am quite mad. I luckily had only written 3-4 posts since then, but 2 of those were paid posts and now I have to rewrite them. Boo…
Just for sh*ts and giggles I wondered if Google might have had those posts cached already. They had every single page and post on my site cached except the ones that I need.
So, I’m off to write those posts again.
BEWARE: Do NOT trust the WordPress export tool. I have seen some other complaints about the same on WordPress.org but have not found a solution yet.
Hey Dennis! Thank you sooo much for the reply! This is an old post though. I have been tweaking my categories tonight and apparently Twitter Tools has been retweeting some. When this happened (about a month ago), I did lose only 3 posts which I rewrote from memory. I will definitely be using WordPress Database Backup from now on! And double and triple checking everything!!
I have seen this same issue occur with a few other people since it happened to me. Hopefully the WP folks get it worked out soon.
Thanks again! 🙂
Any chance to pull the missing posts from the cache of Google results?
If you still have the original titles, you can do an exact match search by placing the title between “”.
Then click on the “cache” link, and copy the text from there.
To prevent loosing some of your posts, I recommend the following post: http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo-plugins-wordpress/
WordPress Database Backup – If there is one wordpress plugin you absolutely need this is it. It gives you the ability to backup the core database tables and any other tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly schedule. While it might be against TOS what I do is set up a dedicated gmail account for each wordpress blog. I then set this plugin to backup the tables every night and email the file to a gmail account. Viola a free daily incremental offsite backup.
Also, subscribe to your own RSS feed with email, and you got all your post in your email.
Hi Jaypee, great tip! I will be checking out that plugin asap. and I love the idea of subscribing to my own feed via email.
Thanks!
I recommend you install the WP DBManager plugin to create regular backups of your WordPress database. You can also use the same plugin to do a restore from a backup file that you created earlier.
Regarding the lost posts, do you publish full feeds on RSS? If you do, make sure you subscribe to your own RSS feed via email. You can retrieve your lost posts from the RSS feed sent to your email address. The only thing you lose are comments or trackbacks.
Hope that helps. 🙂