The Undelete My Blog Project

Recovering deleted blogs - Google too!

2006-03-29T04:49:00.000-08:00

Wow, it seems that I am not the only one who deletes my blog and goes around in circle afterwards. Google itself has done it this time!

According to a post on their official blog googleblog.blogspot.com, they accidentally deleted their blog and the control was taken over somebody else. Thankfully for Google, the blog has been restored and back in running condition.

As visitors of Undelete My Blog Project know, accidental deletion of blogs is nothing new and it happens to the best of us, as this incident shows. I just would like Google to tell us how they restored their deleted blogs so that hapless bloggers (like yours truly!) don't have to go around digging in Google cache for it.

And by the way, I think that it takes a lot of guts to stand up and say that you made a mistake. We are only humans after all. But not many companies do that. Nice going, Google!

Blog undelete utility has moved

2006-03-09T23:19:00.000-08:00

The Blog Undelete utility has moved to a new location. This happened because the previous hosting provider shut down the free service. I located another free host and this one seems to be faster than the previous one. I have updated my posts with references to the old location.

Backup for TypePad users

2006-02-22T05:05:00.000-08:00

I had been discussing methods to backup only Blogger on Undelete My Blog, but I recently came across a post on how to backup your posts if you are a TypePad user. Find more about it at TypePad Backup.

If you use a different blog service and have found out your own ingenious way of backing up your posts, please share it with the world. Just leave a comment and a new post will be made in this blog with due credits given to the contributor. Thanks in advance and happy blogging!

The mystery cache

2006-02-15T22:14:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have found the MSN Search cache to be the best. It is even better than Google's in that it is updated more regularly. However, there is still no way to link to an MSN cache entry from an external site. MSN provides the cache link to a page with an arbitrary number in the URL.

To solve this problem, I approached their customer service. I asked them if there is any way I could gain access to the cache page by using the URL of the page in a query. Unfortunately, it seems there isn't. According to what their customer service told me, that 'arbitrary' number is the inventory ID of that page in the cache at that time. The key phrase is: at that time. So when the MSN bot indexes the page again, the ID would change and hence any link using the old ID would be obsolete.

Hopefully, MSN will come up with a better way of linking to the cache pages, without using this inventory ID in the URL and rather use the actual URL as a value to the cache parameter like Google does.

Backup using Atom feeds

2006-01-29T01:28:00.000-08:00

Prevention is better than cure. Or should I say, backup is better than undelete. I had mentioned some methods to undelete and recover your blog, but you should be lucky enough to have your blog in the search engine cache in the first place. To leave nothing to chance, I will describe a very simple way to backup your blogs on Blogger.

Every blog on Blogger has a unique ID. The first thing you should do is to find out yours. The ID is a short sequence of numbers, and different for every blog on Blogger. Then, goto this URL: https://www.blogger.com/atom/xx, replacing xx with your ID. You might be prompted for your Blogger username and password. Type them in and you will get the feed of all the posts in the blog whose ID you entered. This is an XML file and you can save it to your harddisk. Keep doing this on a regular basis, and you can be assured that next time you need it, you know where to find it. For easy archiving and retrieval, name the file with the date of backup.

Almost all blog services worth their name offer an RSS/Atom/XML feed to your posts. Although the above tip is specifically for Blogger, similar methods should also exist for others to backup their posts. Please leave me a comment if you know how to do this for other services.

Troubleshooting

If you did exactly as mentioned above and still did not succeed in saving the XML file, please checkout the following points.

1. Ensure that your blog has Atom feed publishing turned on.

2. Every blog has a different ID. If you have multiple blogs in a single Blogger account, you need to repeat the process for all your blogs separately, each with their own ID. To get a list of your blogs and their IDs, do the following:

Goto https://www.blogger.com/atom. Enter the username and password when prompted and you will get a list of all your blogs and their corresponding IDs. Use the ID of the blogs you need to backup and save them as separate files.

The search engine with the best cache

2006-01-20T01:43:00.000-08:00

UMBP is designed to help bloggers recover their deleted posts through whatever means possible. As of now, it solely depends on using the cached copies of the blog on major search engines to recover the posts, as I am currently unaware of any other method that works. (Even that, I admit, is pretty rudimentary, but it is better than nothing!)

The Undelete through Cache Recovery utility uses two major cache sources for its working. The first one is the Google cache of course and the second one is the Internet Archive (The Wayback Machine). The latter is totally useless for relatively newer sites, which most blogs are, and therefore Google dominates in the utility usage.

A better cache than Google

Believe it or not, another search engine has a much superior cache than Google. It is the third one of the Big Three search engines, and that is MSN Search.

I know that it sounds controversial and indeed, counter-intuitive; after all, Google is the best search engine out there and has been so for some time. I do agree with that fact, Google is indeed the best right now. But I say this on my experience that I have in using the cache of both Google and MSN and also from some bloggers who had contacted me to help them out in recovering their deleted blogs.

Almost every blog worth its name is well indexed by MSN Search and you can recover the latest post from it within hours from posting it. The more popular your blog, the faster it caches. However, in spite of having a better index than Google, MSN falls behind in searching through them and that is why they are at a distant no. 3.

However, there remains a technical issue in adding MSN to the utility and I have sought advice from MSN in this regard. Hopefully, it will be resolved soon and you can have a better chance of recovering your deleted blogs using the undelete utility.

Blog recovery using icerocket.com

2005-12-25T01:15:00.000-08:00

I hope that all of you who have checked out the Cache Recovery Utility found it pretty easy to use. After all, there isn't much that you are required to do - just enter your blog address, choose the cache source and hit the button. I apologise for short number of entries in the source list, but I couldn't find a way to include other search engines as they use a different way to retrieve the cache of a page. Google, as always, has kept it simple and that is why there are two options from the G.

For those of you who have lost quite a number of posts, getting them all back and more importantly, in the right chronological order, is a bit tricky. The following is a How-To on doing just that.

The tool I use to get back the chronological order of my deleted blog was Icerocket.com, which is a relatively powerful blog search tool. Enter your blog's title (preferably in quotes) and search for on it on Icerocket.com. If that doesn't work, keep trying with the web address or major posts on the blog. Ultimately, you will end up with a link to posts on your blog. Look for a tiny 'Focus' link near the search result, and click it. Icerocket will now fetch you all the posts in the blog that it has indexed, in chronological order.

The coolest thing about this is that you will get links to your individual posts, in the order that you posted them and all you have to do is enter these links into the Cache Recovery Utility and voila!, the search engines will deliver their cached copy to you. You just have to take the trouble of posting them over.

You can also use other blog search tools like Google's own BlogSearch, Technorati, Pubsub, blogdigger.com, and so on.

Undelete blog through Cache Recovery Utility

2005-12-03T21:18:00.000-08:00

Good news for all those bloggers out there who have just deleted their whole blog and is now wondering what to do.The Undelete My Blog Project, in its effort to help recover deleted blogs, has just released the first utility that can dig out the cached copy of their blogs from search engine archives. You can check it out right now - Undelete through Cache Recovery Utility.

This is a very basic utility that can help you recover your blog or website. Go to the utility, just type in your blog address and select a cache source to recover. Hit the 'Retrieve cache' button and voila!, your blog is back before you. However, you can reasonably expect to retrieve the cache only if your blog is quite popular among the search engines and has been around for sometime.

The utility could have been made available on this blog itself, had Blogger allowed me to put the SCRIPT HTML tags in the post, but it is not possible for obvious reasons. Anyway, do check out the site and let me know how useful you find it by leaving a comment here. More info on how to use the utility to recover all your blog posts is underway. Keep watching this space!

Undelete My Blog Project - The Concept

2005-11-14T19:12:00.000-08:00

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.]

The Undelete My Blog Project - The beginning

2005-11-11T06:19:00.000-08:00

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!