This is just a quick update regarding the mistake I made on my blog about a month ago. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, I accidentally deleted all of the comments on my site (check out the post titled “Oops!!!!” for more details). I’m relieved to know that I’ve finally restored most of those comments.

I thought I could quickly restore the comments from backup until I realized my latest backup was made on August 11– which was approximately 3 months too old. Needless to say I was a bit disappointed. I thought over the situation a bit and finally decided on a way that I might be able to find most of the comments that we’re not backed-up by searching through my Gmail account.

Today, I did just that; I searched for any emails notifying me of new comments or comments awaiting moderation dated between August 11 and the day I deleted all of the comments. I managed to find several…not sure how many I missed because I probably deleted some of these emails from my Gmail account incorrectly thinking that I wouldn’t need the email because I had the comment saved on my blog.

Before beginning the restoration process, I created a backup of my Wordpress database (want to know how? Check out Backing Up Your Database). Then I opened my old backup. Luckily, I understand SQL and was able to modify the backup files so that they would only affect my comments table and not my entire blog. Once I restored the comments I had backed up, I manually added the comments that I had saved in email. (To manually add the comments, I typed a new comment on each post copied and pasted the contents of the emails as new comments on the respective posts. Then I edited the comment’s author name, email, and date in the administration section of Wordpress. This seemed easier than writing SQL for each of those comments.) As far as I can tell, everything is working like a charm.

On a side note: I’m not sure what will happen with all of the people who subscribed to comments on the affected posts. Hopefully, I didn’t accidentally flood their email accounts with notifications for new comments that aren’t actually new.

Sorry it took me a month to restore the comments…remember I still don’t have Intenret access at home. I spent part of the day at my parents house on my day off of work to fix this problem that has been bugging me all month.

Key takeaway from my experience: Backup, Backup, Backup!!!!
The Wordpress Database Backup plugin might help you restore your blog in the dreadful event that you lose everything. Combine Wordpress Database Backup with WP-Cron to have automatic backups emailed to you nightly.

I know you are wondering why I didn’t have this auto backup set-up on my site. To answer that question, that plug-in doesn’t work with my web host for some strange reason; I think it is a security setting or something on the web server. I do know that backup and cron set-up works for a lot of other people though.