lost most content with automatic upgrade to wp 3.3

How old was the backup they restored? You likely lost data because the content you lost was not in the backup. It’s best practice anytime you make a change like updating your site’s software that you create your own backup prior to upgrading. Also, it’s wise to maintain regular backups of your site, without relying on the host.

Switching themes will not help in this instance. All the data (content) is stored in the database. If you overwrote the database, this is the likely cause.

At this point, there’s probably little you can do to recover the “lost” data. I know this isn’t the answer you were looking for. Do you have your own backups? If you do, you may be able to restore it.

Tim,

Thanks for the reply. My host provider does daily back ups and keeps the last three days. I have a saved copy of the day the site went bad, so this is probably not good, and also a back up copy of the data base from the two day’s prior. I have tried restoring the data base using Phpmyadmin to import the back up tables. I don’t think I did anything with the htaccess file? I thought I saw on other posts this may be part of a problem like this too. I actually got the first signs of something not working right when I updated my wp-ecommerce plug in, but still had my content, page navigation was wrong. I got advice that doing the automatic update to wp 3.3 might fix it, so I hit the auto update button and it all went bad at that point.

so I have the mySQL data base back up….any chance for me?

If you have a good backup, sure it’s possible. The problem may be, that you’ve upgraded your site to 3.3 but your database backup is from your old version. I would attempt to import your MySQL database one more time to see if that corrects the error about missing content. Am I right in assuming that your WordPress website is just missing content?

If the import is successful or fails let me know. We can try to figure out a solution from there.

Yep, just missing content. I have tried to re-install the back up tables about a dozen times now, I have tried all three days I have back ups for, same result, less the post titles newer than what the back up was of course. I have tried de-activating plugins, all of them, and reactivating. I put the twenty eleven theme back as active, no change to the missing content. Put my theme back, same. My comments are there, my media gallery is there, just what was entered into the visual or html editor of the blog posts. For that, I have only fragments or nothing at all, mostly nothing (like 90% gone) I did notice that my css styling is different on the posts, in the sidebar. They are now bold, and weren’t before. All of the pages, that also are missing the content that was entered into the visual / html editor, still have the normal font styling (not bold/strong).

When you restored the backup, did you restore the files as well? It sounds like you’re possibly missing some CSS files which is causing the change in formatting. Anytime you perform a restore, your database and the wp-content folder should be your focus. All the other files would be standard in an installation.

I re-uploaded all of my theme files, including css. No change. The pages look fine, the front page posts look off.

I still don’t have my content back. I have done the restore with a Mac, could that be my problem?

Highly unlikely. Try restoring the backup to a fresh empty database and edit your wp-config.php file to suit. Also re-upload all files & folders – except the wp-content folder – from a fresh download of the version of WordPress that you were using previously.

OK, I did all this, dropped all the tables in the data base. Got back to the prior version I was using of wp (3.2.1). I still have the same problem(missing my main content), but I did notice that my backup data base file size is 5.8 Mbyte, and the mySQL database file size is only 1.8Mbyte after I restore, so something isn’t coming over. I think my data is in the back up, but can’t get it to all import back in?

Ideas? Any help? I am loosing months of work at this point if I can’t get this back.

Hi all,

I was able to get my original content (mainly missing the posts, in wp_posts table in the mySQL data base) by downloading my back up copy of my saved data base, but this time only one table at a time. Then imported the back up tables into the crashed mySQL data base, one table at a time. That got me back! For some reason, when I downloaded the entire back up of the mySQL data base, then imported the back up, some of the data (mainly the wp_posts table) didn’t make it. The file size was dramatically smaller. But, one table at a time works I get all the data back, same total file size when done.

Thanks for your help.