How to retrieve old Wordpress posts?

ed79 · 25 Nov 2018 at 19:38

A couple of years ago I started a wordpress blog. Never really did much with it and when the first years hosting ended I didn't bother to renew.

Shortly before it ended I downloaded the whole site via FTP so I have a local backup of the root folder containing wp-content, wp-admin etc, and a load of .php files.

Are my old posts located somewhere inside this folder as I can't seem to find them?

Deleted member 77746 · 25 Nov 2018 at 20:27

SQL tables, did you back this up too?

Rroff · 25 Nov 2018 at 20:47

Possible it might have been archived on https://archive.org/web/ - IIRC on my old WP site the SQL data was stored externally so just backing up the install folder for the site wouldn't be enough.

ed79 · 25 Nov 2018 at 21:11

Rroff said:
IIRC on my old WP site the SQL data was stored externally.

Yes, from some googling I think this may be the issue. I used Filezilla to connect to the Bluehost account that had the WP site plus a couple of other simple HTML ones, and downloaded the lot. But it looks like the SQL was somewhere else - and as my hosting account is closed I think I've lost it.

Still, not the end of the world. Thanks both for your help.

touch · 25 Nov 2018 at 22:01

Yep, all posts, page content and other settings are stored in the database rather than files so if you didn't backup the database it's likely to be lost unfortunately.
It's unlikely but possible that the host stored the database backups in your directory so you may have them in your FTP download, also might have had a backup plugin which saved backups. You're probably looking for a .zip or .sql file.

Deleted member 77746 · 26 Nov 2018 at 18:26

You didn’t happen to do a site backup did you rather than a Wordpress backup?

If it was a site backup the SQL will be stored somewhere amongst the files. What file names do you see? Name some...

ed79 · 27 Nov 2018 at 11:38

This is basically what I have backed up but there are no .sql or .zip's inside. I think this is because I manually downloaded via FTP rather than using the backup option in cpanel?

touch · 27 Nov 2018 at 12:39

Yep, as I said before, I think it's very unlikely that you would have a backup of the database in there unless you'd intentionally done so.
Check in /wp-content/ and /wp-content/uploads/ to see if there's any folders in there called "backup" or "sql" or something like that.
Also have a look in /wp-content/plugins/ and see if there's any plugins which sound like they might be related to backups and if they have a storage folder for keeping any database backups.