Last week I updated my blog hosting and ended up losing a TON of data (not just for this site but for a bunch of different sites/systems).

I started from scratch and thought I’d eventually find a backup I’d forgotten about. I had recent backups but I’d been keeping them on the same system I used for the blog (bad idea, I now know). I’d begun to piece back together the site by looking in Google’s cache and copying/pasting from there to new posts (altering the posting dates in the process). Doing it that way would’ve taken forever, plus, Google didn’t always have good copies of my pages, so I’d lose some data. The only backups I could find was going back to 2013.

Well, today, I found 3 other copies of the site, dated April 2013 and November 2014 for the other two. I picked the latest of the two Nov 2014 backups…it put me in a better position, backup-wise. I only ended up losing a few month’s worth of posts and data, vs. years worth.

I used the updraftplus plugin to backup the site on a regular basis. I reinstalled updraftplus to the new install of CMS and told it to restore the site using the local copies I had…it worked!!

I did lose pictures and such…I’ll eventually have to either remove images that aren’t rendering or replace them…in every post that has an image.