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While Blogger was experiencing their difficulties where their clients were locked out of their own sites and such, I was going through some similar issues with my wordpress site here. I was locked out, with error messages telling me my user name was invalid. A little later, I looked at my posts and noticed that my byline no longer said “by ck”; it was just “by” and blank.
After many rather nasty emails with my host provider, they were able to find me again, but only prior to May 7. That means, any of my posts published after that day have disappeared. My hosting provider couldn’t do any better than that.
What is scary is that for awhile, I had ceased to exist in any shape, form or capacity here, at Sister Sage’s Musings, even though I pay the hosting fees, chose the domain name, name of the blog and its’ original conception. I am its’ owner and when I didn’t exist, it looked like there was no owner-admin of the site. Even if a new account were created for me with the exact same info, I would’ve become a new user, and still no original ck as owner.
I wonder if I have been hacked into? My hosting providers were certainly baffled and of not much help. I am not that tech savvy and am worried this could happen again with far worse results like not being able to retrieve anything? Not really sure how to prevent this from happening when I don’t even know how it happened in the first place.
My apologies to those who submitted comments after May 7, who saw them disappear along with the posts.
Do you do regular back-ups of your WP database? There are several WP plugins that will do this automatically. If you had a back up that predated this issue, you could have restored the database which in theory should have restored missing posts and comments.
ck Reply:
May 13th, 2011 at 9:23 PM
You’re talking to someone who isn’t all that tech savvy. So, everything is a new lesson. This one, a hard one to learn. I believed I had a plug-in that does back-ups, but obviously, wasn’t sufficient enough.
Recommendations?
Radical Centrist Reply:
May 14th, 2011 at 12:08 PM
My webhosting does automatic backups on its own, yours probably does too (you’d have to go exploring in your site’s cpanel). However, in terms of WordPress plugins, i’ve been using BackUpWordPress. It will back up your entire site including your database and all your files once every day and if you want, you can have it email the backup to you as a zip file. That way, if something happens such as what you describe here, you can restore the database to the most recent backup version, which would hopefully minimize post/comment losses.
Although elaborate back-up protocols can automate backing up of any type of data, it is VERY SIMPLE to just make sure you save a copy or two (or more) of every post to other locations. By other locations I mean burn them to disk, onto thumb drives or even other computers if you use more than one. Also you could email them to a third party email account (controlled by yerself) like yahoo or hotmail. The email option has the advantage of automatically sorting them by date and you could create folders labeled by month or subject. That’s like having a spare hard-drive or back-up in cyberspace that would be there even if this blog disappeared and someone broke into your house and stole all of your computers and media and IT’S FREE!
I lost the House of Infamy for about a week or so. I had been very lax in my own adherence to back-up routines, but it was a lesson I HAD to relearn. Until the House returned, with never the least explanation, I was able to find many of the posts, or sometimes even a whole month’s worth at a swoop cached in google cached pages which I then downloaded copies of and once the House was back I took the time to make sure I had EVERY post safe elsewhere out of the reach of google or actually anyone incoming from the intertooobz.
Just go back now and make and save copies of everything to date, which won’t take that long (I’m on dial-up and it only took me a couple days when I had time)and then just make a habit of saving copies elsewhere of each new post as it is published. If you can publish a post to your blog, you can save a copy to a removable drive AND your hard drive at the same time.
kootcoot. I always save a draft in gmail. Is that at risk too? Should I open a hotmail account? Glad to see you are back ck. Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I am working on a piece that will explain.
I left a lengthy reply to your question, but apparently wordpress and I didn’t agree about the CAPCHA code and it disappeared. So I will save more detailed explanation for my (hopefully) upcoming post addressing these issues in depth for my less technical blogging colleagues. Since you work with WordPress, and I assume are not hosted on Google Blogger, the gmail account should add an effective layer of “redundancy,” which is the key to data back-up and protection. Having your archives on a thumb-drive (with an index for your own convenience) would be a good strategy to implement as well.
PS
Maybe we all should really think about these issues NOW, as it would appear things could get pretty nasty pretty quickly, if they aren’t already, judging from the recent elections here and elsewhere.