Wednesday, July 14, 2010

How to recover deleted posts and pages in Blogger

If you understand Blogger's URL structure when editing (creating new) blog posts or pages in Blogger, you'll practically be able to recover any deleted posts or pages. However you'll have to make sure that you have a backup of your posts and pages ('Settings' > 'Basic' tab > 'Export blog') before deleting any of them otherwise you will not be able to locate the deleted post or page in Blogger's database (you'll understand it if you read on).

If you go to 'Posting' > 'Edit Posts' tab and choose a post to edit, you'll see the following displayed in the address bar:

Blogger post URL structure

As you can see all blogs at Blogger have their unique IDs (blogID) when they're created which identifies the blog itself in the database. Posts work exactly the same way: they also have a unique ID (postID) and, probably the most important, the same post always keeps the same ID. What I mean is that if once you have created a blog post, it will remain in Blogger's database so if you delete it but know the ID of the post, you can simply replace that part in the URL and you'll be able to start editing thus recovering your blog post.

Pages work exactly the same way with some slight differences in the URL respectively: "post.edit.g" (after http://www.blogger.com/) becomes "page.edit.g" and of course "postID" will be replaced with "pageID". You can easily call this URL by going to 'Posting' > 'Edit Pages' and replace the unique ID of the page you want to recover.

It is important to know that if you deleted your posts/pages and want to recover them from an .xml backup (the one that's created by Blogger when you export the blog), the unique IDs (and the final URLs created out of the title of the post) will change so if you had cross linking between 2 posts it won't work anymore. This is why this way of recovering your posts and pages is so amazing!

Miscellaneous: you can use the above method to have more pages in Blogger than the current limit of 10. To see how, check out soswitcher's post called Blogger - Pages Hack. ;)

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