After 10 days of mourning for the loss of nearly 10 years of posts, I’ve managed to recover my site after all. It’s cost me abou $70, but it was worth it. It’s a lesson in why you should back up your WordPress installation. If I’d created backups on my webhost, backed up my WordPress site, all of this could have been restored for free within minutes.
The trouble is, WordPress has just been too good to me. I’ve never had a problem with it, it gets more and more streamlined and usable with every update, so I just used to think ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever’ when it told me to back up before installing an update.
Thanks to Siteground, my hosts, I was able to retrospectively buy a backup/restore package that would enable me to restore back 30 days. I’m glad that I had the foresight to guess that if I didn’t deal with this soon, the chances are that the hosts wouldn’t have any back-ups.
The biggest nuisance with a failed site is when images go missing. There’s nothing sadder and more illustrative of failure than that broken image-link that appears where a picture should be, and – as I’ve discovered – nothing more fragile and volatile than a digital image. Trivial as it might seem, I was so happy to see the Tooting Heron back up and running after a night of re-uploading the uploads folder.
