This past Wednesday, when trying to get to the dashboard to work on my blog, I was surprised to see the WordPress 5-minute installation page instead. I then tried getting to the blog from my spots in the Commentators lists of fellow Alex Jeffreys students, but to no avail: For the fifth time, I had lost my blog!

Fortunately for me, this time I had a recent blog database backup, thanks to having installed the WP-DB-Backup plugin when first starting blogging. I had chosen to receive the backup file weekly in my mailbox, so I had it handy for the job ahead. Now I just had to find out how to use it…

After doing some research in Google for ‘how to restore a WordPress database’, I concluded that the simplest set of instructions appeared to be in the WordPress Codex itself. Following the steps in the Using phpMyAdmin section of the document, I logged in phpMyAdmin through the Cpanel of my domain. Next, the codex instructs to “…select the database that you will be importing your data into.”

It took me a while to figure out how to identify which database to use since phpMyAdmin listed three different ones under my domain login username. Finally I realized that the backup file name that the plugin generates contains the database name. In my case, the file name was brighter_wrdp2_wp_20091229_243.sql, so I picked ‘wrdp2′ as the database to restore:

The database name to chose is contained in the name of the backup file

And that was the trickiest part of the process! The remaining six steps required three simple clicks of the mouse and in a few seconds I had my blog back.

What a difference from the four previous mishaps… Having that backup file was the key to an easy recovery of my blog, so many thanks to Austin Matzko for a most effective plugin!

  • Share/Bookmark