On Wednesday, 25th March, 2015, the unthinkable happened – my web host deleted my site, with all the latest back ups, database and recent adjustments. Poof! Six years of blood, sweat, tears and delight gone in 60 seconds. One minute it’s there, the next it isn’t.
Whilst in a little shock, I soon realised I wasn’t in tears and set about looking for the most recent copy of the database that I had on my laptop. February 2014 – a whole year out of date. Well at least I still had a copy of most of the content.
Tarot Elements is now hosted on Wordpress.com and isn’t self-hosted, at least for now. This means a few changes, as well as the database being out of date. All the recent work in setting up of the site more as a CMS than a blog, the deleting of old posts, the new material added to the Tarot Card Meanings section, has all been undone.
The images all lived in a separate folder on the old server and are now all missing from the site. That alone will require manually adding of each and everyone to nearly 300 posts and pages, something that will take time and effort, all over again, as well as finding the most recent posts through Mailchimp and manually adding them, sigh.
So my lovelies, please bear with me while I spend the next few weeks (and probably months) getting things back to what you know and love. I may make further changes to the site while we are in transition mode, but I’ll keep you informed of anything noteworthy.
And please, if you have your own self-hosted site, make sure your admin is watertight, your payments set to auto-renew and keep the latest copy of your database, images and any other settings and content separately from your hosting environment.
If you get the lesson, you don’t need the experience, and believe me, you don’t need this one.
I’m so sorry that happened to you. But I’m glad you’re back up and mostly intact. I frantically clicked on every Tarot Elements link in my Pinterest for two days trying to find one that worked. It’s good to know that you didn’t jump ship.
Hi Katrina,
I’ve mapped the domain so all links will now work, it’s just going to take some time to get the images back in place.
Thanks for your interest and support.
Catherine
I am so sorry to hear this Catherine! I hope you are back up in running order fast! {{HUGS}}
Thanks, Theresa, I’ll get there, eventually, lol.
Man, that really sucks. I still have a self-hosted WordPress, but I am on auto-renew with Hostgator and I use a plug-in, Backup to Dropbox, that backs up everything once a week.
All hail to a fresh new look when you’re done! :)
Wise moves, Joanne – keep up the good work and keep your good work protected :)
Oh man that is rough. :( I don’t know if you know about the Way-Back Machine but I searched your site and the last time it was archived was March 15, 2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20150315012037/https://tarotelements.com/
I don’t know if this helps or not…but I hope it does!
Hi Magicuddle,
I’d totally forgotten about the Way Back Machine – thanks! Though I didn’t realise it indexed the site, I thought it was just a snapshot of the home page. I’ve been able to grab some work from there that I thought was lost, though the image replacement (the biggest job) is a manual job and happening slowly.
Doing a happy dance this morning – thanks again!
Catherine
Just found you site this morning. This is the first post I read. Ouch! I had a similar experience years ago when Google ate my blog, then refused to give it back. Kudos to you for rebuilding and for doing such an impressive job. [applause]
Thanks for your kind words, the rebuild is still ongoing but at a much slower pace.
Glad you like the site :)
Catherine