Recovered!

Okay, that took a lot longer than I thought it would.  I finally recovered the site completely back to where it was before the hacker attack.  And I’ve made some significant improvements behind the scenes too.  End result is that I now know more about in the inner workings of the webservers and their interactions with WordPress than I ever really wanted to.  The upside is that I hope it won’t happen again.

The major lesson learned from all this?  Take good and frequent backups.   My mistake was in the frequency of the backups.  When the site was compromised, in order not to lose all data, I had to fall back to the ‘last known good’ backup.  Regrettably, the only backup that I could guarantee was not afflicted by malicious code was several months old.  As luck would have it, several very intensive and popular posts weren’t in it.  In this case, google cache was my friend in recovering the text of this articles and I was able to reconstruct them easily, though it took some time.

So now, my site maintenance time can be better used migrating older content (like the Hero’s Journey) and restructuring the site towards the new direction it will take.