Alright. You have deleted your whole blog and want it back, you just don't know what to do. Hold on, there is hope yet.

Your blog may be completely recoverable and everything can be the way it was, provided you are ready to pitch in some time and effort. There is no magic 'Undelete' button which you could click and have everything restored to you. There would be no purpose for this blog to exist if that was the case. You need to have the patience and the determination to restore your posts. So, without further small-talk, let us get on with the show.

If you are a regular Web user, you would have definitely used search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN are the Big Three search engines on the Web now, and has been so for sometime. When you search for something on these search engines, you receive results for your searches. Along with the links to the relevant web-sites, they may also have a 'Cached' link.

Cache

Cache is the storehouse of the search engine where it saves a local copy of the billions of web-pages that the search engine crawlers visit. Normally, cached pages are older than the actual pages that the links point to, and so they are pretty useless anyway. However, the original site may have been taken down or the particular web-page removed or renamed, and the user doesn't get the page when he clicks on the result link. This is when the cached copy of the page becomes so useful because the user can access the information he was looking for, although the page is no longer on the Web. So, we are going to recover your blog from the search engine cache.

Not all blogs are cached by search enginess. So if you can't find a cached copy of your Web-page, you are going to have a really hard time recovering your posts.

The longer your blog has been on the Web, and the more it has been linked to, the higher are the chances of your blog being found and indexed.

With all the basic information in place, we shall move into the specific details of recovering your posts, but that is the subject of the next post.
[Please feel free to leave any comments, questions or suggestions.]

| Permanent Link

One evening, like many others before it, I was playing around with blogger template and settings in Blogger. The blog in question was Wandering in Elysium , a blog that I had been posting for sometime now. I had created another blog with some unremarkable content, and I was about to delete it. I chose the delete option. Blogger, very prudently, asked me if I was sure that I wanted to delete it. I was in a hurry and something else was also in my mind, and so I casually clicked 'Yes'. Only then did I realise that it was my precious main blog that had been selected, and before I could say 'blog', it had gone. Yes, I had actually deleted my blog. Every single word of it.

Well, if you actually go and visit that blog now(Wandering in Elysium) , you will see it that it has been brought back to life. I will tell you how and everything related to it, but that will be in the postings to come. Hey, I have just started this blog, you know.

The Undelete My Blog Project (UMBP) is a personal endeavour of a blogger who knows what it feels to have all of his postings go 'poof' before his eyes, and worse yet, that it was he who did it. In the postings to come, I will share with you, dear reader, my very limited knowledge on blogging and more importantly, what to do and where to go for help to get it all back, or atleast most of it. If you have any information to share with me and others in need, you are requested to leave a comment. I shall acknowledge all helpful suggestions and comments and make this as constructive as possible, to everyone concerned.

Long live the blog! Long live the blogger!

| Permanent Link