The past 24 hours have been a blogger’s nightmare for me. I wanted to upgrade my GoDaddy’s hosting account to IIS 7. Unfortunately, they do not have any upgrade option, so you have to call their customer service, cancel your current hosting account, create a new one and build everything from scratch.

What this means, of course, is that you have to backup your current website yourself. I created a backup of the SQL database, and used FileZilla to transfer all the files to my computer. Now, here’s where my stupidity comes in: When FileZilla finished the transfer I assumed all was OK. I quickly browsed the root directory and saw that all the sub directories were there, but I forgot to verify the most important thing: the database backup. It seems the wretched FTP software reports errors into a tab at the bottom, that doesn’t even get focus if there were any. Talk about trustful computing.

I realized my grave mistake only after the old account was gone, when I went to upload the website to its new location. I immediately called GoDaddy. It was a matter of minutes since the account was cancelled, yet they informed me that the restore fee would be $150! That’s how much it costs me to host the entire site for  two years! I told them I’d get back to them.

What could I do? Well, it was Google who came to the rescue. Google indexes my blog. Google has cache! So I wrote a small program which fetched the cached pages (per post, since I wanted to restore the comments as well) and parsed them into a simple data structure, which I serialized into an XML file. That was the easy part. The hard part was using the cumbersome Community Server API to repost everything.

As a side note, GoDaddy does have one useful tool, which I only found later (and which might have saved me all this trouble): You can compress/uncompress files using their file manager. Had I compressed the entire site with the DB backups into a single file, I never would’ve missed anything. And the transfer is much faster that way.

It’s finally over and normality has been restored. The old posts’ unique IDs may have changed because of this debacle, so I’m deeply sorry if some of them have been duplicated in your RSS reader. I have attached the code I used, should anyone ever need it (it’s a bit messier than my usual standards). I also added the two config files you need in order to setup Community Server 2008.5 as a single user blog (spent a few hours digging that one up).

Morals of the story:

• Never trust an FTP software for backup. Verify it again and again.
• TANSTAAFL. GoDaddy is cheap, but I just discovered a major disadvantage.
• You should backup your website regularly on your own. Don’t rely only on your hosting provider.
• Being the good Atheist that I am, I have accepted Google as my personal savior.
• URLs are important. I worked extra hard so that all of the old URLs would remain the same.

Attachment: RestoreBlog.zip