May 5, 2014 was a sad and frustrating day. As I looked over my Google Blogger site there were no pictures anywhere. Thank you Google!

This whole mess started very innocently….

A few weeks ago I set up a Google Drive account so I could store files “on the cloud” and access them from any computer. Great idea, right? Well, now I know that it’s only a great idea if it works for you–not against you.

I decided that it would be a good idea to place COPIES of my cruise blog photos on the Google Drive site so they would be easy to access and to share with others. However, I soon discovered that each time I booted up a computer with Google Drive installed on it that it took 2-3 minutes to synchronize the files on the computer and on the cloud. Seeing how I had COPIES of over 500 photos from my blog site on the Google Drive, I thought that I would remove that folder to help speed up the synchronizing process. Bad, bad idea!

Shortly after I deleted the folder I decided to go to my Google blog site to email a link to some posts that a friend was interested in viewing. To my dismay I discovered that Google in its infinite wisdom decided that if I didn’t want the photos on my Google Drive then I must not want them on any other platform that Google has them on–so Google deleted all of the photos on the blog site! The text remains but in each place where a photo should be there is only a symbol as a place-holder for what used to be there 🙁

Now at this point I must tell you that the whole episode is also kind of spooky. I am currently reading the book “1984” with Big Brother in charge of everyone in Oceania–telling them what to do and making decisions for them–perhaps there’s a connection–Big Brother/Google?

Back to my tale of woe…. I went back to Google Drive and restored the deleted folder with all the photos in it. The folder and the photos came back to Google Drive but no improvement on the blog site.

Next I surfed through Google Blogger Forums looking for help and other people who may have encountered the same problem and found a solution. I found lots of people who had the same problem but nobody had found a solution. All of us thank you for this Big Brother–I mean Google.

In my quest for a solution to my problem I discovered that Google Drive actually has a free help line where you can talk to a real human being. I got connected to a really nice fellow named Paul who spent a lot of time trying to help me find a solution to the problem. Unfortunately his expertise was limited to problems with Google Drive and not with Blogger, so even after trying a variety of sources, we had to give up. But thanks for trying little brother Paul.

So, after all of this effort I find myself with only one way to fix my problem is to rebuild my blog, post by post.

A few lessons learned….

1. I made a big mistake in not backing up my Blogger site. Perhaps if I had done that I would have been able to restore the site with the photos.

2. Don’t trust Google to do the right thing for you. I only wanted to remove files from a single location. The wizards at Google think differently – their logic is “If you don’t want files here, then you must not want them anywhere else”. Its a good thing that Microsoft Windows doesn’t think that way or we would all be in a fine mess with missing files everywhere!

3. Check before you delete anything on any Google platform. Google Drive, Google Blogger, Google+, Picasa – they are all interlinked and you never know what might happen if you make the wrong choice.

I am now rebuilding my blog posts on my own website which is here at: kntsnplots.com.

All future blogging posts will be on my own site–where I get to make the critical decisions–so you can be certain that I will be having lots of problems in the future to share with you 🙂

Thanks for listening & happy blogging!

Wally

PS – there is a bit of a silver lining in this cloud (no pun intended) – as I rebuild my web posts I am reviving many fond memories of my adventures on Ananda and with my family & that’s brought me a lot of pleasure!

I have kept a blog since 2010 using Google Blogger. It is very easy to set up and use and I also really like the email posting app that I can use with my iPhone and iPad.

I also set up a web site for SV-Ananda in 2011. Having a web site enabled me to share experiences and information in a different way than the blog platform. Unfortunately, it was cumbersome trying to maintain two distinct sites. I found that through WordPress I could merge the two together and have the best of both worlds.

I am very much a novice at all of this and spend a lot of my time on a steep learning curve. but I have found that there are many people out there sharing their knowledge and experience through a variety of forums and this has been extremely helpful. I hope that by sharing my particular experience on importing my blog will help others.

My blog/website is based on the Weaver II design. After conducting some research I learned that WordPress had a tool specifically for importing postings from Blogger sites. I used this tool to import my blog site into SV-Ananda’s site. It worked very well, importing over 150 blog entries—many of them containing multiple photographs strategically placed within the text. I am very pleased with the results. I have reviewed many of the imported blog pages and found all of them to be virtually exactly as they were originally posted.

My only comment is that the importing tool includes a progress bar that shows how many pages and how many photographs have been imported. The page count showed correctly but the photo count did not and this caused me concern for a while. However, as I stated earlier, so far I have not found any imported pages that are missing photos.

Cheers! Wally

I have been keeping a blog and a website since 2010. I was very active in posting to the blog during my cruise through the Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence River, and through the Maritimes to the Bay of Fundy.

Since that time my blog entries have tapered off – working for a living kept getting in the way, but I occasionally found time to make a few posts.

Now that the website and the blog are merged together I hope that it will be easier to share information and adventures with family and friends.

Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. I’d love to hear from you.

Wally