Search Engines To The Rescue
Monday 12th December 2005 06:21:13 PM
I made a huge mess-up on Saturday night in terms of this blog. I was on the internet and had just typed up and posted the crazy nutter entry. It was around 9pm when my bro came in telling me Amir Khan is on the telly, around this time I was fiddling about in the database that is used for this blog. I meant to empty the table which tells me all the creepy crawlies that have visited my blog instead I emptied the table that stores all the posts! The scary thing is I didn't even realise what I'd done and went to plump myself infront of the telly to watch Amir Khan punch the hell out of his opponent.
After a quick two rounds Amir had done his damage, that's when I returned to my laptop and loaded up my blog. "This blog contains no posts" said the text on my main page, and when I loaded a post it said "This post cannot be found". Eh what's all this? I was thinking maybe the host took the database down for an upgrade because he did say he was going to do this. Then I logged into my database and found that all the other tables had data in them, this is when I realised what I'd done.
Aaargh! I couldn't believe I didn't keep any backups, all my posts since the beginning of my blogs existence had disappeared. Man, I was sooo vexed. I was going to pack it all in since I didn't have any posts, and leave the domain and hosting to expire.
I asked my host if by any sheer chance he had a backup of that particular table, the answer was no.
Luckily enough, I remembered the cache function that search engines have. So I hopped over to google and typed in site:www.toseef.com which showed all the entries google had of this blog. By clicking on the cache link you can see what the page looked like when a search engine visited your site. Here is an example of the main page in the google cache.
Using the google cache I managed to retrieve 90% of my posts and the other 10% msn did the trick. I spent a few hours looking at the source code and entering the date and time in timestamp format (which was a pain).
There were a few glitches in the code after I had entered all my posts into the table. Before the posts were ordered by their id no, but now the posts were not in the same order and because of that I got weird results. I got around this problem by ordering the posts by their date, and now the problem is solved.
I'm not going to risk anything like this ever again so I have a created a backup system for the comments table, which will auto update when a comment is left. The posts on the other hand I will have to manually backup as I do not have a system in place yet.
So here we are, everything is working perfecto thanks to search engines rescuing my butt.
Posted by Piniyini in Search Engines
Blog Posts
Dude, that was SO lucky. I know what ya mean about having to hack the source code though - it's especially annoying when there's tons of formatting, images, links etc... which is why I back up my blog every month... must go do it now, thinking about it. TF for Google and MSN caching :)
if only i knew how to backup my files.. but that was a real smart thing u did. updating everything again must have been a real pain but im sure its better than losing everything.
Challoo!! hehehe
Smart thinking babe!! Hmmm... perhaps I should start backing up mine. If i lost the posts I'd be lazy and just tell everyone "Y'all already read it, so move on, get over it!!" lol
P.S- I never knew you had a brother (?!)
As Shaima said it earlier, it was so smart of you to recover that stuff the other way....
And I could have died if that happened to me!
reminds me.. (this is during the early napster days) I managed to create a library of my best music (over 3000 mp3s), spent a week sorting them into various categories, renamed all of them, and then soon after accidentaly deleted the whole lot.
Felt like something died inside me, the only time i seriously considered killing meself :(