Nov 2, 2005

Recovering deleted blogs

The other day, the most terrible thing happened. I was messing around with the Blogger interface, and before I knew it, I had deleted my blog. This blog. Yes, 'Wandering in Elysium' had vanished into thin air.

I was horrified. Shocked. Down in the dumps. Call it what you may, it wasn't a great feeling.

I fumbled around in the site, searching for ways to recover the blog or some magic button which will bring everything back to life. Alas, there was none.

I refused to give up. Then, a thought struck me. I summoned up a couple of search engines and entered a few keywords from my blog and I scanned the results for references to my blog. And there, near the links to the blog address, I clicked on the 'Cached' link. Gotcha!

It took some time, but I had done it. With some meticulous searching and formatting, I had recreated my entire blog, right from scratch. Couple of blog tools like IceRocket also helped me out in ordering the content as in the original one. The only sad thing was that all the comments posted on my blog were gone for good. But still, this is better than being 404'd!

P.S: For people who didn't quite get a grip on what happened till now, here is what happened. The major search engines on the Web keep a local copy of all the pages they have visited in an archive, and this is what they call 'cached copy'. That means that you can still search for content on the engine and find pages that have been removed from original locations, even months after that has happened. Of course, they should have been spidered by the search engine first.

What I did was extract the cached copy from the search engine and recreate my blog, right from the very first post. Do leave me a comment and contact info if you need any help on how I did this. It is pretty simple actually, but I will be only glad to help out a fellow blogger in need. :)

19 comments:

MadV said...

Once it happened with me also. But I dint go for cached pages from google, but I had saved the source for some rough use. And I recreated everything from that :). Anyway Congrats for getting back ur blog into itz prev state.

Anonymous said...

That was smart thinking on your part. Very smart. Glad you were able to recover.

Christa said...

I have a question, I deleted mine last night, kind of by accident, kind of on purpose, although I know that doesn't make much sense. Now I am trying to follow your lead based on the instructions you gave in this post. Which search engines did you use to find the cached copy of your blog? I can't find anything on mine.

Christa said...

Sorry to keep bugging you, but I found it! Great advice, I tried three search engines till I found one with the cached option. My next question is how you go about extracting the copy and recreating your blog? My email address is c_tess@yahoo.com. I appreciate your advice!!

Rosemary said...

I've been downloading the whole blog with my ftp program and saving it in a folder on my hard drive. You've reminded me I need to do that tonight.

Glad you retrieved that much, anyway!

Wendy said...

I also try and save my html to a file every so often... thank goodness because I lost one of my blogs just the other day. I can't remember exactly what I did, but it was gone in a heartbeat and I was panicked! That is until I remembered my files. Good to know about the cached pages, although I'm not sure I'm good enough to make that work! :)

rinaz said...

I'm glad that you're able to create your blog back. I would panic wouldnt know what to do if it were me. Have to admire your determination

Rick Lobs said...

I also deleted my blog from blogspot. I found it as you said in Cache. But, here is my problem how do I retain the address so that people who have it bookmarked will find me. Right now all they will get is that it had been deleted. I am at: deanlobs1@aol.com and would be in deep appreciation for your help. Thanks. Rick

Ranjit said...

Rick, when you delete your blog on Blogger, you lose ownership to the address as well. You can reclaim it immediately by creating a new blog using the old address (e.g: lobsterpot.blogspt.com). Once you manage to get recompile your posts from the cache, you can post it one by one to your reclaimed address. There is no other way to do it.

If luck has it and your old address is taken by somebody else, do try and write to the person to please have your blog address back. Good luck with that! Glad to be of any help.

Do let me know how it goes!

Rick Lobs said...

Your kindness paid off and I secured the address back. But, my problems have not ended. Apparently I have a seperate account for the one lost and set up again. My other three blogs are apparently on another account. I can access them but I cannot access the one I lost, then found, and now cannot access to post or even to delete the blog. I can do nothing with it. Alas. I have tried all the help suggestions in Blogspot to no avail. If only I could access that account.

Rick

Ranjit said...

Rick, your access to the blog depends totally on your access to the corresponding Blogger account. The only way to bring all blogs into one account is to delete the blog in one, and reclaim it immediately using the second account. However, if you have lost access to the account altogether, nothing short of help from Blogger Support would suffice.

Rick Lobs said...

Thanks, Rankwil, your help is appreciated.

I am shot down I think. I can find no way to write a human being at Blogspot. All their help is pre-witten.

Oh, well, it could be worse.

Rick

deepdowne said...

it happened with me too. but i didn't delete the blog accidently;
it was on purpose. i had my reasons. but later i regretted. and i did the same cache thing and copied the pages back. only you have to spend some time to restructure the entire blog. i recovered all the posts, yeah from the very first post :p

Nasir Sarker said...

Thats' really a Good Idea!

thx&rgds,
nSr

The Dude said...

I accidentally deleted my blog because somehow, my dashboard language was switched to Thai (I currently live in Thailand) and I pushed the delete key without realizing it. My blog that I accidentally deleted is massive - two years, hundreds of posts. Only the most recent posts were cached. Any thoughts about getting back the older ones? This is a disaster!

Ranjit said...

@ the dude:

Do post a dummy entry in the deleted blog address so that you reclaim it. Let me know your blog address and I can help you find it on some search engines that I used for the purpose. You would get only text matter though, all images would be lost, I am afraid. All the best!

Anonymous said...

hi!!!

I don't know what really happened but there is a site tracking my blogs e-mailed me that they can't reach my blogs so what I did is checked if the code was installed propperly and what I found was no blogs under my account. This was new but I was full of effort doing these two blogs. I have read the comments from this post and theyd guaranteed of such kindeness that you have. The thing is I don't know what FTP means or how to use it and I am only renting a computer to have my blog. Hope you can help me too. Thanks in advance my mail is junemyr11@hotmail.com and the affected bloggs are:

http://bhabylove.blogspot.com
http://daisydang11.blogspot.com

Roo said...

i am horrified as this very thing happanned to me as well. i have nearly 600 posts. it hurts.
unforchunately, i have not found ONE cached post. so, i am at the mercy of blogger to help me....
i hope they can.

Sam and Josh said...

What do you mean by cache and how do I find my deleted blog. Not to computer savvy, but I did go in and get my URL address before anyone else could. Could you help me?