The correlation between a wrong page shown by Blogger and a little moment of distraction on my part was the cause of the unsavoury disappearance of more than 80 percents of all comments posted on this blog. Though the event is quite annoying, I was actually very lucky: after weeks (months?) of postponing a backup of this blog, I had finally performed one just 10 to 15 minutes before this happened... All was fine, except that I had no experience in uploading this saved copy. Not willing to take any chance, I therefore registered a new blog and uploaded it there first. I repeated the operation several times and made a few experiments in order to know what was the best way to proceed, which thanks to an abysmal internet connection took me most of the day. All should be fine by now, except for a few details that I'll address in the course of the next days:
- Some links within the posts could lead to a "Page not found" error.
- As of now, the "LinkWithin" gadget is virtually useless.
- A lone comment in the "Volkswagen Typ 3" post could not be preserved; I therefore wrote it back under my own name. All my apologies to his author.
The first two problems are due to the fact that all replacement posts have been attributed new page addresses by Blogger, despite the fact that I erased beforehand all the posts that needed such a replacement. Apparently the only way to preserve the original addresses is to import the backup file to a brand new blog, but this would have caused even more trouble. I'll correct all links, and try to solve the LinkWithin problem by removing it for a while, then re-installing it, hoping that the pages will be indexed anew.
At least, the good side of this bad experience is that I'll think of backing up my blog more often, as I doubt being as lucky next time. And for those of you also writing your own blog, my advice is to do the same regularly. If you never had a try at it and have no idea how to proceed, from your dashboard go to "Settings", then choose "Basic" and click on "Export blog" and follow the instructions in order to download an .xml file containing the whole of your blog onto your hard disk. The whole operation only takes a few seconds.
At any rate, all my apologies for any (hopefully temporary) inconvenience this may cause.
- Some links within the posts could lead to a "Page not found" error.
- As of now, the "LinkWithin" gadget is virtually useless.
- A lone comment in the "Volkswagen Typ 3" post could not be preserved; I therefore wrote it back under my own name. All my apologies to his author.
The first two problems are due to the fact that all replacement posts have been attributed new page addresses by Blogger, despite the fact that I erased beforehand all the posts that needed such a replacement. Apparently the only way to preserve the original addresses is to import the backup file to a brand new blog, but this would have caused even more trouble. I'll correct all links, and try to solve the LinkWithin problem by removing it for a while, then re-installing it, hoping that the pages will be indexed anew.
At least, the good side of this bad experience is that I'll think of backing up my blog more often, as I doubt being as lucky next time. And for those of you also writing your own blog, my advice is to do the same regularly. If you never had a try at it and have no idea how to proceed, from your dashboard go to "Settings", then choose "Basic" and click on "Export blog" and follow the instructions in order to download an .xml file containing the whole of your blog onto your hard disk. The whole operation only takes a few seconds.
At any rate, all my apologies for any (hopefully temporary) inconvenience this may cause.
2 comments:
That's a big problem, Lorenzo.
Thank's for the advice... i'm going to make a backup this instant.
Glad this helped José António! ;)
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