Hi everyone! I used to run a small music journalism website focused on the Seattle music scene, but I took it down for a while and now want to revive it. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that when I stopped paying for the hosting service with HostGator, I lost all my data since it was stored there rather than on WordPress. Thankfully, there's a decent archive of the site on the Wayback Machine (link below), but so far, developers I've consulted haven't found an efficient way to retrieve the data besides copy-pasting it. Any advice or help here would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot! If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
[https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://danstunesseattle.com/*](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://danstunesseattle.com/*)
2 Answers
This situation can be tricky, but it’s not impossible! Since HostGator deleted your data after you stopped paying, your best shot now lies in using the Wayback Machine. I'd recommend you try a tool like the Wayback Machine Downloader to extract the HTML from the archive. After that, you could employ a WordPress importer plugin to convert the HTML back into posts on your site. It won't be flawless—you might lose some formatting and metadata—but it'll help recover a lot of your content. If that doesn't work, a WordPress recovery expert can help automate the process, although it may come with a cost. I’d suggest starting with the DIY approach first!
Honestly, I’m afraid the data might be gone for good. Without your backups, retracing the steps of how your WordPress site was set up can be tough. The most feasible option now seems to be pulling your articles from the Wayback Machine and either setting up a new WordPress site or reposting them manually. You might even consider adjusting the posting dates or noting when they were originally published. Next time, it’s a good idea to keep backups elsewhere, like in Google Drive or another cloud service. Did you not keep any files locally or are there no other backups left?
I totally messed up. I did have backups, but they were stored in the Google Drive associated with the email I deleted when I took the site down. I even asked a friend at Google if there was any chance of recovering it, but since it had been over 3 months, nothing could be done. I do have backups of some of my own pieces, but with over 50 contributors to the site, a lot of them might not have copies of their articles. It’s been 6 years of work, and chasing everyone down for their pieces might take just as long as copy-pasting everything from the archive.