EMERGENCY HELP! WordPress community I need you!

[kings-road]

Chaps, please help if you can. I’ve managed to delete 95 per cent of my WordPress site and can’t work out how to get it back. I really need your help.

The site is https://www.krcsc.co.uk – it’s a cricket club website that did have match reports, scorecards etc going back to 2009.

However, I’ve been wrestling with getting a bbPress installation working for a while now and on Tuesday tried to import the users (don’t know why). That’s when my problems started. For some reason all my users except me (the admin) disappeared.

So, I exported the users the from my database and imported them into WordPress (again, don’t know why I did that).

Anyway, all the names etc were all messed up so I deleted them (idiot) and with them all my posts.

I’ve looked in the database under wp_posts and all the latest posts are missing.

I called the hosting company to get them to roll it back, they did but it’s made no difference. Can’t understand that – can anyone think of a reason why if they restored the database to before I messed around with it the site won’t just go back to how it was???

Help! Your advice on what to do to get all my work (a LOT) back would be very, very much appreciated!

[esmi]

Did you backup your WordPress database before you carried out the import?

[kings-road]

Ahem. No. Thought that question was coming… But surely if the hosting company have done so it shouldn’t be a problem (I will do so as well of course in future…).

[kings-road]

Just reading through this, might help: https://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/restore/

[Roy]

Your story is a little off. Deleting a user, does not delete posts, neither should importing new users (that have no assigned posts) and deleting them afterwards. In fact, even not just importing users, but also posts from an export that does not include the latest posts deletes posts. So the question is, have you been deleting before trying to import or made some other uncanny decission before starting to experiment with users?

[kings-road]

You’re right Roy. And I’ve got nearly to the bottom of this – thanks for responding. Basically, I tried to restore the wrong database – yes, I’m a t*at and I’m very sorry.

Have restored the database now and my posts are back, the only thing is the images have disappeared from the site and my users still aren’t there.

Any idea why that might be and what I can do? Sorry to be a pain (I’m learning this WordPress thing through trial and error).

You can see what I mean here: https://www.krcsc.co.uk

There’s meant to be an author and images dispayed on every post but they’ve gone.

[Roy]

Well, that /southwimbledon-360×250.jpg really isn’t there. Many other images are. The september folder is empty, but august contains a whole line of images.
Btw, I can browse your uploads folder. I don’t think you want that.

[kings-road]

Eek, presumably does that mean I’ll have to go through every post and add them??? Nightmare!

And my uploads folder – should I be protecting it and if so how?

[Roy]

Did you also clean and replace the backup for the uploads folder? It does not appear to be the latest files that are missing, since even from a 2010 folder I missed 1 image but saw dozens.

Somehow my uploads folder is protected by default. Perhaps a server setting, but you can do that with htaccess. The description of this plugin gives a hint:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/private-files/

[kings-road]

Thanks for the help Roy – I think with your help I’ll sort it out. Phew!

[Roy]

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/