Sluggo has been a headless server for just a few days now. I ssh to it to login, I download stuff from the command line with wget, and so forth. I also remove stuff with rm, no more gui-based file deleting into a nice safe recycle bin.
Soooooo….., when I got the inevitable nattering message on my WordPress dashboard that my version was out of date, and I should update to version 2.8.6, I did what I usually do, only from the command line. I deleted the wp-admin and wp-includes folders from by blog folder, then… OOPS!! Geez I deleted the wp-content folder by mistake. Deleted as in rm -fr wp-content. I.E. GONE. FOREVER.
I of course did not lose my cool. I had just backed up my WordPress database with the backup plugin before the deletion, so all I had to do was restore my backup. The backup though is a compressed sql database file. It doesn’t contain the specific wp-content folder. And, worse, the WordPress plugins were all in the plugins folder which was in the wp-content folder! So no restore plugin was even there anymore!!
Of course I had a backup of the whole website didn’t I? Sure, found it, from 2007! Meanwhile I should mention that every time I tried to view my site during this process all I saw was a blank screen. I copied my old wp-content folder over — still blank screens!
Oddly enough during this process, my posts were still there on the dashboard. Every word of every post. So the posts weren’t in the wp-content folder anyway. I finally figured out that my theme was broken, because it was in the themes folder which was in — you guessed it — the wp-content folder I had deleted. Then, presto-chango, I went and went back to the default WordPress theme, and, lo and behold, there was my blog back (in its original default WordPress theme ugliness, but there nevertheless). What was missing were my uploaded images. They too were in the infamous missing folder. I have copies of all them (I think). I’ll take this opportunity to update my blog theme to something more modern and attractive, and restore the images. And work on a better backup system…
