Can I recover a missing content page?

By kristacole on 5 Mar 2009 at 21:00 UTC

I am looking for help. I am not a techie nor do I know code. However, I am THE person who is putting content on our webstie, written in Drupal by a web designer, www.emmettidaho.com My problem is that a page "went missing". I was working on a content page called /organizations and I believe the page was closed down in the edit mode. Know the page is gone and I am wondering if there is a way to retrieve it. Can someone help me? Krista

Comments

Unfortunately no I doubt it

dnewkerk commented 5 March 2009 at 22:09

Unfortunately no I doubt it (depending maybe on what the actual case is). If what happened is someone was editing a page, added content, but then the browser window/tab was closed without saving, then that unsaved data is permanently lost. Drupal itself at that point had no interaction with the data at all - it is still just being held temporarily in the form by the web browser. I wrote about a few optional modules you could use to help avoid this happening: http://www.davidnewkerk.com/book/106#avoid-data-loss ... I believe there are also a few Firefox extensions which approach this from a different perspective, causing every form to be saved periodically to a local text file as you write it or offering a save button/option on form textareas (I don't know the names of the extensions).

If you are trying to recover previous changes on a node which had node revisions enabled, then you can do that through the Revisions tab that will show on that page. If no Revisions tab shows, there are no revisions saved for that page.

Also if a node or other piece of data is deleted from Drupal, it is immediately and permanently deleted from the database - the only way to recover it would be from a backup of the database itself (or if there's no backup and its your own local server, possibly with undelete/recovery software). There isn't a recycle bin or other holding area when you tell Drupal to delete something - it asks whether you are really sure, and if you click yes, the data is deleted from the database.

If the page is "just missing" as in the original path isn't working... it might still exist. Check admin/content/node for a list of all content Drupal has for your site.
Best of luck.

Edit: forgot to mention... if the page has been previously "online", was deleted, and you want to recover the text, an option is checking Google's cache. Search google for the page in question (e.g. a bit of text or heading you know was on the page)... often Google retains a "cached" copy of the page which you can click and then copy/paste the text.

A couple further comments

frames commented 5 March 2009 at 22:39

"There isn't a recycle bin or other holding area when you tell Drupal to delete something - it asks whether you are really sure, and if you click yes, the data is deleted from the database."

True. The closest to this that can think of is marking the node as unpublished. You can make it dissapear from your site to your users, but it's still there, to be "reused" in the future.

I didn't know of Safeguard, thanks for the pointer. I also know Draft, which also will let you auto save "snapshots" of posts or comments. If the node was lost because it was not saved, this one could also have helped.

Also. If it is REALLY important to get that info back to life ... (and this is for the techies out there) Does MySQL have something like Oracle redologs or any transactional logs that can be re-applied? I highly doubt this will be of any use here, but ... and anyway, that would still need you to save the node itself so it was stored in the database at some point.