Here's a small bit of knowledge from the Drupal.org forums that'll be news to no experienced user, but is very important for newcomer admins or any user given power to delete content on a site:
If you delete a node (Page, Story, anything) on a Drupal site and decide you want it back, is there an undo feature? No. You get one chance to back down when Drupal asks "Are you sure you want to delete [node title]?", but that's it; click 'Delete' again and it's gone, man. There's no Trash Can or Undo option or other means of retrieval. Your only possible recourses are:
1. Restore the node from a database backup. (You should of course have such a thing.)
2. Look for a cached copy of the node on Google or some other web site caching service. You'll have to rebuild the node from scratch and re-input all of its fields, but at least you may be able to recover the node's main body text from the cache. (Who knows; you may even have a cached version of the page within your own browser's cache.)
Fortunately, it's easy to avoid data-wiping accidents. Make sure all users know that there's no easy undo for a deletion. (Alternately, don't give users permission to delete nodes in the first place!) When you do want to take a node off the site, consider hitting that node with a simple unpublish instead of a delete. It'll disappear from sight (and site), but will nicely lie dormant until you should choose to resurrect it.
Post new comment