2.21.2020

why this blog looks strange right now (updated) (upperdated)

A post was accidentally deleted -- an essay that took a while to write. Happily, I had recently backed up the whole blog. And thank goodness, as it had been a long while since the previous backup.

In order to restore the missing post, Allan imported the backup copy... and instead of all the posts merging, they re-posted. I think that's because they were originally posted by me, but imported by Allan, making him a new author, causing Blogger to read the imported posts as new.

Now we've got to get rid of about 7,000 duplicate posts.

Sadly, all the lovely comments on this post have been lost. There were about 30 comments; five remain. That's frustrating. Although nowhere near as frustrating as losing the post itself.

* * * *

Update. Horrible update. Now all the duplicate posts are gone... but so are all the comments. Thousands of comments. All our discussions. All gone.

I cannot even think about this being permanent. We are still working on it. Hoping to post another update soon.

* * * *

Upperdate. The 1,000 most recent comments now appear through the comments feature in my dashboard. They do not show up on any posts, but at least they exist. At some point, I could copy them into comments in each post, noting who originally posted them.

Comments from the earliest posts of this blog still exist. That's an enormous relief.

Comments on posts between July 2016 and November 2018 no longer exist. I take some comfort in the fact that I wasn't writing that much during this period!

This has happened because Blogger's backup and restore function does not work properly.

2 comments:

impudent strumpet said...

I don't know if you've tried this yet, but would marking the comments on your dashboard as spam and then marking them as not spam restore them? If it worked, they could be restored in a batch.

laura k said...

Hmm, that's worth a try.

Unfortunately we learned that the 1000 comments that exist in the dashboard include a few recent ones, then the rest are from 2006.