How I Recovered My Blog After It Was Deleted

I hate to say it, but the ending of Keppford.com was like many things, a causality of Covid.

It’s weird to say that this blog hasn’t been active for over more than a year, but you know life happens so this is the story of how I recovered my blog after it was deleted.

When the pandemic first hit in 2020 and we were all stuck in lock down, I spent my time diving into other hobbies which led me to ultimately launching my brand, Lumpsum Studios. (post coming soon!)

Since we couldn’t travel, let alone leave the house for more than an hour, there wasn’t much content for me to write about so when my web hosting expired it completely slipped my mind to renew it.

Then 3 months after it expired, the ideas for posts started flowing and I decided to log in to see if I could get things up and running again.

There was definitely that stomach drop feeling when I learned that the cPanel backup file for my site no longer existed. The realization of the importance of storing a separate backup of your website really hit me hard in that moment. Harder than Caty Heron realizing that the limit does not exist.

I scrambled to the folder on my external hard drive it would be in if I did have a backup and quickly started to feel like a real dummy.

Leaving the conversation with the customer service rep with my tail between my legs, I purchased a new hosting plan and Googled every version of, “how to recover deleted blog.”

Before I announce the legend that helped me get all my content back, I should tell you how I felt about the whole situation.

Even though I had 6 years worth of content on there, I wasn’t upset about the whole ordeal because I was the only person to blame. It all could have been avoided if I renewed my web hosting in time or kept an updated backup file of my website. At the end of the day, I’m always looking on the bright side and saw many positives of this ordeal happening.

Before the blog extermination, I had just given my blog a complete makeover and I completed the transfer myself so there was definitely room for error. With this reboot, I was able to start fresh with the new theme and add my content correctly so it displays as it should.

So how will I add my old content to a new blog if it was deleted?

It’s time to introduce the OG, Wayback Machine. It’s an internet archive that takes screenshots of internet webpages over time for anyone to reference later. Whoever came up with the idea and coded it, I am forever grateful.

The good news is, I managed to copy the text from a majority of my old posts and place them on the new website. The bad news is, none of the images were captured and image content was a huge part of the site.

With this conclusion, I’m currently on a mission to add all the photos back to each post before making them live which is going to take a while. Until then, I want to share new content but felt like I needed to give a little explanation as to what happened and why. And if you’re feeling antsy, you can scope out my portfolio section.

If you read this, thanks for sticking around and leave a comment telling me about the time you deleted something really important on accident so we can cry now, laugh later together.

Thanks for reading and stay hungry to learn, create, and grow!