Can’t find the uploaded articles in the database

  • Hope you all have a wonderful day.

    I apologize if I make any terminological or technical mistakes. I’m just someone who has to deal with these problems on my own without any prior knowledge of coding or website management.

    We had a website hosted on a Synology NAS. I made several mistakes when trying to update the website, and as a result, it seems the entire website got reset and all files disappeared. I’m not able to restore to the old version since I forgot to backup using the WordPress plugin.

    Fortunately, I did copy all files from our NAS before the disaster happened – the “wordpress” and “web_images” files. I hope I can find all the articles we uploaded throughout the years from these files in order to repost them on the new website (after it got reset).

    As this article(https://www.malcare.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-understanding-the-structure-of-a-wordpress-site/) explained, my understanding is that all uploaded articles normally would be placed under the “wordpress\wp-content\uploads” path, sorted by upload year and month. However, even though all files exist, none of them actually store any content, whether txt, php, or any other format. That is, for example, we have folders from 01 to 12 under year 2023, but all of them are empty except for photos in jpg format, even though I’m certain we posted articles during that time.

    I even tested uploading new articles on the new website to figure out where the files would be stored. They’re still not in the aforementioned path.
    Some have suggested that perhaps the articles were not placed under the “uploads” folder, but under other plugin folders. I have opened all of them and still cannot find the articles. I hope I’m not dead wroung, but I assume those files are still somewhere in the folder right? I can download all new articles using both phpmyadmin app and the export tool from the WordPress website, but not from the files themselves.

    I’m really hoping someone can solve my problem. To put it simply, I would like to know where the uploaded articles are stored if not under the “uploads” folder. And if possible, I would like to know if my problem is even solvable… or perhaps those files were simply lost and there’s nothing I can do now.

    Thanks in advance.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hi @ychi99 ,

    In WordPress, the actual content of your posts and pages is stored in the database, not in the file system. The files you see in the wp-content/uploads folder are primarily media files (like images and PDFs), not the text of your posts or pages.

    If you can access your Synology NAS’s database through phpMyAdmin or another database management tool, you might be able to recover your posts. Look for tables like:

    • wp_posts: This table contains all your posts and pages.
    • wp_postmeta: This holds metadata for your posts, including custom fields.

    You can export these tables to restore your content to a new WordPress installation.

    Yes, it’s solvable if you can access the database and find the content there. If the posts are not in the database, unfortunately, they might be lost if you don’t have a backup of the database.

    Thread Starter ychi99

    (@ychi99)

    Hi @ranjeetkaur ,

    Really appreciate your response.

    I found out about the existence of phpMyAdmin after I wrongly reset the website, and there weren’t any previous articles there. I just checked it again, and they still weren’t there. All posts there are those I uploaded after the disaster.

    Does this mean that the folders that I copied are not helpful in my current situation? May I ask what you mean by saying texts are stored in the database rather than the file system? Are they still somewhere in the drive of Synology’s NAS (so all I have to do is find a way to get them and repost them), or are they stored in WordPress’s online database to which I have no access and perhaps they no longer keep my previous content anyway?

    @ychi99

    You have to check if backup of database is available in that case the data can be recover. If not found you can also contact to hosting provider if they can provide the old backup of website.

    May I ask what you mean by saying texts are stored in the database rather than the file system? I mean that the uploads folder only contains the images, pdf’s etc.. But the content of the website like pages, posts are stored in database.

    • This reply was modified 3 weeks, 3 days ago by ranjeetkaur.
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