The Four-eyed Journal » Backup

Recover lost blog posts with Feedblitz & Google Reader

jhay — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:56:20 +0000

The most devastating damage this blog took from the recent hack attack + database screw-up was the lost of six month’s worth of blog posts.

Though my webhost has managed to provide me with a copy of my blog’s database before the hack attack took place, the backup was unusable. It sucks big time! So I had to be more resourceful and figure out a way to recover most if not all of the blog posts I’ve lost.

The first solution that came to mind was Google Cache. That neat service by Google wherein they keep a snapshot of the web pages it has indexed. So I tried that but unfortunately, Google has also cached the corrupt pages of my blog so it was also unusable.

My hopes of recovering those lost blog posts nearly died until I saw that my Google Reader has the last 16 posts I’ve posted. Yes, I do subscribe to my own RSS feed. I do this to see how my posts really look like via RSS.

Google Reader has a copy of all my published blog posts from years back.

Going back, I thought that if Google Reader had my last 16 posts, maybe it has all the posts I’ve ever published since I had long subscribed to my own RSS feed years ago. Thank the stars for Google Reader, it does have them! All posts from way back to February 2009 were still viewable via Google Reader.

While browsing how far Google Reader had copies of my past blog posts, I remembered another way of recovering the ones I’ve lost. That silent and almost forgotten feed subscription and newsletter service known as Feedblitz.

It allows blog readers to subscribe to their choice of blogs via email. A simple newsletter of sorts that delivers every published post to my subscribers via email. Then I remembered that I had my very first Gmail account subscribed to it way back just to see how my posts were displayed by Feedblitz. I logged in and I almost jumped for joy when every single post I’ve ever published were right there in my inbox complete with post styling, embedded images & videos to boot!

Thanks to FeedBlitz, I was able to archive my published blog posts in my Gmail account.

So now, it’s just a matter of copying posts both from Google Reader and Feedblitz to my blog and re-publishing them. This would also be a great opportunity to update some posts that need to be updated and fix the typos I’ve left unnoticed since then.

The only drawback to this method is that the comments and trackbacks the posts have collected over time have been lost forever. Which goes to prove that it’s still best to have a working backup, even multiple backups of your blog’s database.

Nonetheless, I’m content that there’s a sure way to recover the lost blog posts and in the coming years, I know better how to prevent this harrowing experience from happening again.

If you had your own share of blog hack attacks and other methods of recovering lost blog posts do share them for all to read and learn from.

Poll of the Week: Which backup medium do you use?

jhay — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:13:20 +0000

I’d be amazed if you would answer “floppy disks” to this question. LOL Seriously. It’s not to offend but I’d find that very interesting and nostalgic – in a geeky sense.

Anyways, this blog may not have thousands of daily readers but for those who would visit, stumble upon or discover this blog by any chance (via feed readers, email subscription, search results for Naruto p0rn etc), please take some time in adding your answers to this week’s poll question:

“Which backup medium/s do you use?”

[poll=6]

There are 4 choices, which are the general categories of how backup mediums can be classified.

CD/DVD-RW – for now I lumped all optical media storage types in one category.

Secondary internal hard disk – if you’re not going to dual-boot might as well use it as backup storage right?

External hard drive – for those who have the money or the know-how to transform a spare HD into an external storage solution.

On-line storage service – this could also be a hack like GDrive, but nowadays these online storage services are becoming popular.

You can vote for all of the mediums that you use. If you also would like to share your reasons, stories, tips and tricks or experiences with any or all of the storage mediums in the comments thread below. I’m sure it would be a worth-while read for everyone else. The poll closes this Sunday midnight, March 2. Then I’ll compile the comments and stories, analyze what data will be gathered and present a nifty post next Monday. I hope all of you would join in. ^^

Automatically backup your blog DB using WordPress Database Backup Plugin

jhay — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:29:50 +0000

One of the most basic routines we bloggers get to acquire as we grow and maintain our blogs is make regular backups of our blog’s database. This is important because when tragedy strikes like database crashes, WordPress or plugin updates and migrating blogs from one host to another, we can rest a little easier knowing that we could restore our blog to its most recent state thanks to that backup of the database.

However, this basic and important task is often times neglected and taken for granted by the casual blogger (read: the not so geeky ones) and so when tragedy does strike; frustration, despair and even financial loses are greatly magnified because we forgot to make an up-to-date backup of our blog database. I’ve read so many stories ranging from simple corruption of a few database tables to a major destruction of the database itself from different bloggers and these incidents are no laughing matter.

More than one solution

Thankfully, there are a number of solutions to remedy and mitigate this problem. One way of creating backups of our blog database is using the backup features of CPanel which powers most of webhosting accounts today. If you’re a hardcore techie, or simply the smart and adventurous one, there’s also the option of using phpMyAdmin in creating database backups.

For the rest of us, general bloggers, there are many WordPress plugins that allow us to create backups of our blog DB without getting under the hood of our hosting account. The most popular and widely-used plugin is Austin Matzko’s WordPress Database Backup plugin.

With this plugin, you can create backups of your blog database whenever we need to. This plugin has saved my blog a couple of times and I’ve never used another plugin that does the same thing. However, as I’ve said earlier, not all bloggers are that diligent with their blog maintenance and religiously creating backups of their blog DB.

Feeling lazy? Let the WP Database backup plugin do it for you

Fortunately, this plugin has one very, very neat feature and it allows us bloggers to schedule the automatic creation of our blog’s database backups. Say what?!

Yup, if you haven’t noticed yet, the bottom-half of the Backup creation page under the Manage menu is a section that allows us to do the following cool things:

Schedule when a backup of our blog database is created
Choose which database tables are to be included in the backup file
Specify an email address where the plugin will send the backup file of your blog’s database

All of this requiring no action from you except for specifying the settings of the automated backup creation. Awesome isn’t it? Just set it and forget about it. You’d just recieve an email containing the backup file of your blog database as an attachment sent to you on the day and time you first set the whole function. Mine is set to create and send the database backups to my email every Sunday of the week.

Since I’m using my .com.ph email is powered by Gmail, I created a label+filter setup that automaticaly archives the mail sent by the plugin containing the backup file as an attachment. In effect I have created a weekly snapshot/timeline of my blog’s database so in case I need to restore my database, more than one option is available for me to choose from.

You too can enjoy the convenience of automating the backup creation of your blog’s database simply by enabling and customizing this feature of the WP Database Backup Plugin.

But wait, do you a different backup plugin? Does it have the same automated backup creation feature? Please, do share your stories. ^__^