Potential 4-month data loss disaster

This turned into a novel, so I guess my most important questions are as follows: Are my WordPress posts housed in the database and, if so, what is the method for retrieving that data? Feel free to read on for the full report, if you are daring. ??

Hello, to everyone; I’m new to the forums and new to blogging, which will become perfectly clear as you read on. I put together what was to be a simple blog, each entry comprised of a photo and a paragraph of text. The plan was to input all the data compiled from my previous email newsletters prior to going live. After inputing over four months of daily entries, I realized that the site was only visible on my computer.

I assumed this was related to the Index file, but I couldn’t find any information on how to point to a different area of the site. You see, eventually I want to have a full site built in DreamWeaver, but it was taking so long to learn and produce, I thought I should start with a blog, because it would be “easy”. This was the reason for putting my blog in a separate “Blog” folder instead of at the root directory. This brings me to my first big mistake, which was to move the content to root directory. I’m on a cloud server, so there was some confusion on my end as to whether the root was actually the root or in /web/content.

I tried several different moves (mistakes 2-5) and could never get the site to appear on a different computer. In fact, now when I tried to see it on my own computer, sometimes the pictures where missing, sometimes the formatting was missing, and sometimes I couldn’t access it all. I decided to move everything back to where it was and find a different solution. As you may have guessed, I couldn’t get that to work either. I later found out that the cloud server my web host uses was only working intermittently throughout the day. I now realized that one of the many setups I tried may have actually worked, but I wouldn’t have been able to see the results, because the server was down.

The problem I then faced was that I had all sorts of folders everywhere on the server and was unclear which ones should actually be there. I reasoned that all of the images were in my uploads folder and all of the data, I “thought”, was in my database. Just to be safe (lol), I copied the entire website from the server to my local machine. I then exported my database to my local computer. At this point, dear reader, I’m going to stop keeping track of the number of mistakes I made, as there are too many to track.

I tried reinstalling WordPress (by the way, this all happened while the latest upgrade was made available and I upgraded as I was told to). I pulled all info on the server to the trash and reinstalled, but it said I already installed it and I needed to clear the tables in the database, in order for this to work. I had no idea what this meant, but I found a post about reinstalling WordPress that said I should delete my current database and database user, in order to do a clean reinstall, which I did.

I then thought I would be able to replace the Uploads folder with my own filled with photos and then import my database information to get my posts back. When I tried to import the data, however, I got a massive error log saying I may have discovered a bug or that there may be something outside of the quotes? I’m wondering if this has to do with the fact that I was trying to import old data to a new database and user.

By the way, to answer the obvious question, I did not know about WordPress backups so I never did one manually. If they are also done automatically, I would love to know the details on how to get it back. Are backups kept anywhere else, such as my host that I could roll back to? So I now have a working copy of WordPress with none of the data from my website at all. If anyone has any suggestions before I start re-entering 4 months of daily posts, I would love to hear it.

Thanks for listening.