Lost All Your Entries? No Backup? You Could Try This...

If all guestbook entries are lost and there is no way to get a backup from your host, here is a last-ditch effort, but it requires a considerable amount of work. Read everything before you try this, as it may not be beneficial for you.

A Pound of Cure
Go to Google.com and enter your guestbook's address in the search box. If your guestbook has been indexed, you should see the link in the search results. A few lines down is a link to the Google Cache results. Click on that link. If you have managed to get here in time, you may find the page shows your entries the way they looked before they were deleted. Save the page or "select all" and copy and paste the entries into an email, notepad or other wordprocessor.

This will only show one page of entries. To get other pages, look at the address of the cached page you found. Add the guestbook entry page increment after the "index.php".

Example:
I want to recover the guestbook entries for one of my members' sites, pauldelacour.thepraisegates.net, I would enter the following in the Google search box:

www.pauldelacour.thepraisegates.net/guestbook/index.php

When I click on the link to "Show Google's cache of (www).pauldelacour.thepraisegates .net/guestbook/index.php", it only shows the last page of guestbook entries, and the following is in the address window:

http://IP#/search?q=cache:48ZNF10p9k0J:www.pauldelacour.thepraisegates.net/ guestbook/index.php+&hl=en&client=firefox-a

Normally in the Guestbook, when you click on "Next Page" it adds "?entry=x" at the end. Since I set up the Guestbook in Admin to show 10 entries per page, "x" would be in increments of 10, or "?entry=10", "?entry=20", etc. So, to find the next page, I would input the following address in the Google search window and look for its cached page:

http://IP#/search?q=cache:48ZNF10p9k0J:www.pauldelacour.thepraisegates.net/ guestbook/index.php?entry=10+&hl=en&client=firefox-a

Important Notes:
You must do this within a couple of days, as Google revisits your pages often. When Google visits, if your entries have been deleted or your page has been hacked, that is what will be cached. (If you are planning on doing this, you might want to first disallow robots indexing the guestbook until you're done. However, some robots do not check the robots.txt file on a regular basis and will index anyway. I don't know Google's M.O.)

You can only get as many entries as were in your guestbook at the time of the last indexing of your site. If there were 40 entries when Google last visited, but you had 45 when they were deleted, you will only find 40 entries in the Google cache.

Do this at your own risk. I cannot be held responsible for the outcome unless it's wonderful.

If you have disallowed the guestbook in robots.txt, this won't work. Possibly, other factors would prevent this from working for you, such as the use of frames or page encryption.

If you believe your guestbook should be there but you can't find it, try entering just your main site in the search box and then looking under the following areas:

# Find web pages that are similar to www.xxxxx.com
# Find web pages that link to www.xxxxx.com
# Find web pages that contain the term "www.xxxxx.com"

Once you have copies of the entries, they need to be re-entered into your guestbook. You can enter them from the guestbook's addentry or through an .sql file. Use "copy" and "paste" to do this. If you decide to just enter them from the guestbook, go to admin and turn off flood control and email notification temporarily. The dates will show the dates you entered them, not the original dates. If you care about the dates, Here's a link to a Unix timestamp converter. Change the dates in the database:

http://www.4webhelp.net/us/timestamp.php

If you aren't sure how to put the entries in the .sql file, you can always make a few entries into the guestbook and then export the database to a .sql file. Examine the exported file and you will see where to paste the info for each entry. A rather tedious process, and it has to be exact or MySql will return errors.

Sorry, some of my wording may be awkward, but I did the best I could. I am only sharing this process I have used to recover many guestbooks when the admin did not keep backups. There may possibly be other faster or easier methods. Remember, I called this a last-ditch effort.

The website mentioned was used only as an example. There may not be actual guestbook entries there.

Two Ounces of Prevention:
It's a good idea to backup your databases on a regular basis. It is so easy, and quick, to create an .sql file. There are some instructions in the thread titled "Advanced Guestbook Fixes And Mods."

Every good host keeps regular backups of the entire server. If you can't get a backup from your host, perhaps you should consider changing hosts.

I love my web host.

Cool trick!

That is also why I do a backup each and everyday. All my websites and all my mysql databases.