This site is run off the popular content management system/blogging platform, WordPress. Thanks to John Crenshaw’s amazing skills with the software for porting it into a real article database (if you know what WordPress is, you’d have no idea this site was run using that software). While he may be good at coding websites, I have to come clean…our database didn’t crash…John deleted it…by accident.

Now, I didn’t crash the database, nor did I restore it, but what I did do is learn quite a bit in the past few hours about restoring a website back to the way it was so I thought I’d share a bit about what happened, how it happened, and how we fixed it, in case it happens to any of you.

In addition to running Truthful Lending dot Com, John runs a web design and search engine marketing company called Mirage Design Works. He was doing a bit of tweaking with a site he was working on and, being the suave web designer he thinks he is, deleted a database, ignored the confirmation message, only to realize he deleted the database for this site. It’s ok John, stuff happens, right? Anyway, the way the database was deleted, it couldn’t be recovered and, since John’s been busy setting up automatic backups for this site, he, apparently deleted the most recent backup files as well during the setup. Well, auto backup was all set to run when John deleted the database and CRASH!!, no more Truthful Lending dot Com (if you stopped by in the past several hours you’d have seen the result).

Anyway, here’s how he fixed it. And thanks to John for teaching me this in case I ever do something so dumb Just kidding!.

First, he restored the database with an older backup he made on 2/11/08. Well, we’ve had a few more articles and news stories added since then, so that didn’t do the full job. Since the other, more recent backups were deleted, he jumped on archive.org to find some older copies of the site that he could copy the newer articles from and repost them. Alas, archive.org only has this site cached up to April of 2007, so that didn’t work.

Then, he searched Google using this query…

site:truthfullending.com

In case you don’t know, that will bring up all the pages Google has saved for truthfullending.com. He had to customize the query with Google’s advanced search features to only find sites indexed since the last backup (a little over two months ago). He found all the most recent articles that weren’t in the older backup and copied the content and reposted them. He used Google’s cache feature to pull up older copies of the articles. Whenever you search Google, the pages that come up in the results will have a link near the bottom that says “Cached;” if you click on that it will pull up a copy of the page that Google has saved on their own system from the last time they visited the site. So, even though the site was down, John was able to view the copies of the pages that Google has saved on their servers, copy the article content, and repost it here.

Well, I imagine if John hadn’t gotten that taken care of I’d be spending my weekend rewriting articles…thanks for saving me that one John!

Anyway, if you notice some older articles posted as if they are new ones, this is the reason.

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