Ninjas Stole My BLOG! How I USED THE FORCE TO GET IT BACK (and how you can prevent this too)

Its been a crazy week honestly, on Thursday I had one of the scariest things ever happen to me. Scary as in something really important taken away. There's somethings thing that we just never think about breaking, being stolen, or just being taken away with a blink of an eye.

If you've been following me for a while and following this blog you know that I occasionally put out some decent content on here, make cool walk through videos and exciting blog updates and post. I've gotten recognition for my upbeat and 'hip' video techniques and how I apply them to this industry and I share them all on this site.

Well on Thursday the 12th of April (right before Friday the 13th) I bought a cool new plugin that I'm going to be testing out to help increase my opt-in rates by 30-40%. I got the plugin installed it and found out that it doesn't work well with my version of wordpress, simply because I don't like updating my version of wordpress because almost everything for wordpress is made individuals and not made by wordpress themselves. What that means is that when wordpress updates it may interfear with some the programming of the user created plugins and themes that everyone uses, which I've had happen before.

So I was putting off updating wordpress just for that simple reason. But since I had this new plugin that I wanted to test out... I just HAD to update to version 3.31.
So I go to my Godaddy account and click the update wordpress version in their application back office. Its the easiest way I know how to safely update.
When I update it usually takes you blog down for like 30 minutes while it updates the version and then its back up with the new version.

So I checked back on my blog around an hour later to find out that my blog was the way it looked when I first installed wordpress.

The default ugly theme, no videos, no post but... wordpress version 3.31. I was pissed beyond belief, I thought it was a "fluke" but I honestly didn't know what to do.
I went back into my Godaddy account to reset my blog to an earlier date, its something I learned to do when my first blog got hacked a few years ago.

Then when that didn't work I started to just think...

"What the hell do I do now? All my awesome content is lost, my search engine traffic goes no where, and my affiliate links are not in existence to make me money."

So, I went and I did what I normally do when something goes wrong with one of my websites. I called GoDaddy!

After going through their crazy automated customer support, getting transferred back and forth I finally spoke to a human and told him exactly what happened.

It took him about 20 minutes to figure out what happened, he told me my DATABASE was corrupted from the update, which normally NEVER happens. (The database, if you didn't know, is where wordpress keeps track of all your content, all your info and layouts. Wordpress uses  the database to keep track of 80% of everything on your blog, including links and layouts. So when it gets messed up, you are screwed)

"Just my luck" ,  I thought.

He said they have an of site sever that they keep back ups of everyone's stuff for everyone's sites. Their files, their content and their databases.

He then told me that they have to manually go in and restore everything by hand and that the fee for it is usually $150 for restoring the files and something ridiculous  amount of money for them to put everything back together.

I told him that I would think about it and would get back to him and that I had one more trick up my sleeve before I caved to the all-so-mighty GODADDY services.

I went in and stayed up ALL night working on my blog trying to get it back to normal.

Around 3-4PM on Friday the 13th, I used my last ditched efforts to get everything back.

And it WORKED

I got my blog back, safely, securely and it was actually a LOT easier than what I expected.

WHY?

Because right before I updated my blog I used a tool called "BackUp Buddy"  which is one of the easiest plugins that I've found that backs up not only your files for you blog, but your database too!

Its a plugin that you simply install and set a schedule to back up your blog automatically on a set day. Plus you can choose to do 2 different types of back ups,

1.) A Full Blown Back Up, Database and Files

 
2.) Just a data base back up.

Right before I updated my blog I did a full blown back up but I had no idea how to actually use it, since I've never had to before.

The back up you can either save on your computer or leave it saved into your website files. They have a simple 6 step back up system that literally restored my blog in 10 minutes after I figured out how to work it.

If  I didn't use this plugin, I would be spending close to $500 right now to restore my blog and still be fully out of commission for another week, losing money, traffic, sales, and new leads.

I highly recommend this plugin if you ever want to back up your site safely and easily.

You can grab it here <---

You know its one of those things you don't normally think about, kinda like when you don't think about being healthy until you are sick or don't want to be well until you get a cold THEN you go out and get medicine and look for a solution. Luckily I thought ahead and I think you can too!

Ninja's can't stop my blog from being awesome, trust me on that!

To your success (and not losing your blog)

~Jeremy Watson