Now if you’ve read my previous post you are probably thinking that this relates in some way to that but actually it is a completely different issue – it’s a totally different website for one thing but also a totally different problem. Today I woke up and went into this blog to update a blog post. For some reason I couldn’t do it and it kept saving as the previous version.

Thinking it was just a glitch I went and did other things and came back a couple of hours later to find that all of our blog posts had disappeared completely from the blog. It was showing zero blog posts on the WordPress Dashboard and when I looked at the site in my browser the site was there but no posts were showing up.

I went in to the online chat with my hosting company and they said they could see the site and the posts. So I rang Wanda to get her to check and she could see it too. So thinking it was just me I went and tried using the Firefox browser and sure enough the blog posts were there when I viewed the site. But when I logged into wp-admin using Firefox it showed no blog posts. So I refreshed the browser to view the site again and the posts were no longer showing. So it was obviously a caching thing that was allowing others to see the posts….but they were definitely gone.

So back on to my hosting company to see if they could restore the site. Yes they could but it would cost $15. Fair enough, I was silly enough not to back it up so I should pay the price.

In the process of filling out the online form for Hostgator to get it restored I had to find out the actual files I wanted restored. Since I don’t know too much about where posts are stored in WordPress I had to do a bit of research and I also thought that maybe I could figure out what the problem was first before having to hand over $15.

Eventually I found that WordPress posts are stored in a separate database which you can find in your hosting companies admin area which in my case is CPanel on Hostgator. So in I went and found the area called MySQL Databases where the databases are held. That was easy but once in there I couldn’t figure out which database related to this blog. There are about 10-15 databases in there and all named something obscure which in no way resemble the name of this blog. So again I had to go and figure out how to find out which of those databases belonged to this blog.

I eventually found the answer on a forum post where someone had the same problem. So what I had to do was go into the blog files and find wp-config.php using Filezilla (which is the software I use to transfer files from my computer to the internet and vice versa). I had to transfer that file over to my computer and then open it up in Notepad so I could read the contents. At the top of the file it told me the name of the database.

Okay, so I was getting closer to figuring this out so I continued researching. I found another site that spoke about PhPMyAdmin in relation to WordPress databases. I had no idea what that was but there was an icon called PHPMyAdmin on my CPanel so I clicked on that and on the page that opened up was an item listed called ‘Databases’ so I clicked on that and up came my list of databases.

I clicked on the one for my blog and on the next page was a list of tables one of which was called wp_posts. Aha, I thought…this has to be where the blog posts are stored. So I clicked on that and lo and behold I got an error message saying that it had crashed.

So back to Hostgator I went and told them about the error message. They told me I simply needed to select ‘Repair’ from the drop-down box and the database would be fixed. I did just that and sure enough it brought all of the blog posts back.

Woohoo!! So today I have been lucky but I am not going to take any chances in the future and have downloaded and installed a WordPress database plugin that will backup the WordPress database and allow for restores if required.

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