As you may have noticed, the past week presented several problems with this blog, mainly stemming form problematic plugins and corrupted databases.  However, at this point, most of them have been solved.  I apologize for any unavailability, errors, or multiple posts you may have received.

WordPress runs primarily off databases – all posts and comments are stored in them – and once corrupted, a blog is typically not operable.  Bloggers depend on having a blog that it is accessible for a greater portion of each day, and if it isn’t, they face the chance of losing a ton of money, readership, and lots of time.

During the process of trying to repair WordPress, I contemplated whether a clean install would take place, and when you receive the “Hello World.  Welcome to WordPress.” post, you know that either everything has been destroyed, or you still have much of your content restored.  It is crucial that you don’t make critical mistakes trying to restore a blog, as much of the databases, content, and admin areas can be restored safely with either a backup or rewrite.

I have provided the steps below to restore a database, in simple terms, which helped recover my blog, from being unable to access by admins and users.  (Visitors were redirected to the install page when trying to access the home page).

1. Be sure that you have plenty of backups on hand before performing any of the steps listed below.  Use backup plugins, however, don’t rely solely on them.  Plugins like Backup WordPress can make automatic backups of your SQL daily or a full backup weekly, which is stored both on your server and can also be emailed to you.  Make weekly, or sub-weekly backups at the very least.
2. Sign-in to your hosting account or server.  Go to the main cPanel screen.
3. Find the Databases area, click MySQL Databases, then you will be presented a simple screen for making minor changes to your databases (checking, repairing, deleting, and creating).



4. Find the database you wish to repair, typically _wrdp1 if it is your first install. (I don’t know what _wp01 is associated with, as nothing happened when I tried to repair the database of that file.



5. Click Repair DB, and the process of repairing your database should take place, typically within a few seconds.