Oh no! Can you restore my site's images??

  • Unknown's avatar
    medelste · Member ·

    Hi, I’m in need of help for my site fiftytwopointfour.wordpress.com.

    I was doing some housekeeping a week ago and cleaned out old images from my site’s ‘Media Library’ because it has become so cluttered with hundreds of images over the years. I presumed that the Media Library was just a holding area for media as it transferred from my computer’s hard drive to my blog, and not the source for my live site’s media! On the page where I deleted the images, I read no indication that that was not the case, and received no dire warnings about deleting the images. So I deleted hundreds of them.

    As you probably know, now I see that my site has hundreds of missing images! Most of my blog’s content was contained in my images, not my text (my blog is about NFL predictions and the images are my records of my prediction results). So now all my prior year content is effectively erased.

    Is there any way to restore the missing images?!?

    I’m crossing my fingers that your engineers can do this!

    Thanks,
    Mike

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Is there any way to restore the missing images?!?

    As far as I know, the media library doesn’t have a recycle bin, and deleting images from there is permanent. But I’ll tag this for staff in case they can do anything.

    If WordPress.com doesn’t still have backups of your images, you’ll have to add them back manually. If you don’t have copies on you computer anymore, you can try searching for your site on Archive.org. You might be able to recover at least some of your images that way. http://archive.org/web/

    I presumed that the Media Library was just a holding area for media as it transferred from my computer’s hard drive to my blog, and not the source for my live site’s media!

    For future reference, all images used online have to be hosted somewhere. In our case it’s the media library. Your posts (and by extension an export/backup file of your site) only contain links to where the images are stored in the library, not the images themselves. I’m sorry you had to find this out the hard way.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Sorry, there’s no simple way to get them back. :(

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