What To Do If You Lose Your WordPress Blog Posts

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Do you use WordPress? Have you accidentally lost some blog posts? On another blog I own, I inadvertently deleted an entire user account and all the blog posts associated with it. That was a hard lesson to learn. If this happens to you, here’s what you can do to restore them:

• First, go into your cpanel or cgi back door and try to access your backup. Most web hosts store a backup or offer a service to let you back up your files. I highly recommend the service if your web host provides it
• If your web host doesn’t have a back up service or you haven’t signed up for it then attempt to access the MySQL files in your CGI panel to restore those posts
• If that doesn’t work, go to each the search engines and query the domain name. Find all of your posts and click on the cached version then copy/paste the posts back into WordPress
• This will create a whole new post so don’t ping them. Otherwise, you’ll be pinging Technorati and all blog search engines a second time for those posts. That might be considered spam and you don’t want to be known as a spammer.
• You’ll also have to enter a 301 redirect for each of the posts you lost in your htaccess

I should have copied and pasted the cached version of all of my blog post pages first. It would have saved me a lot of time. If this ever happens to you be sure you take these measures quickly because the longer you wait the less likely you are to recover your posts.