All widget data lost when plugin deactivated

looking through past support items I found the following:

If you have a backup of your database you should be able to recover the old widgets from there. All BSTW data is stored in serialized format inside a record in the wp_options table having option_name = ‘widget_black-studio-tinymce’. Data storage is handled by WordPress and not directly by the plugin itself. The widgets data is intentionally kept in the datatbase upon plugin deactivation / deletion to avoid content loss.

I can’t find the ‘wp_options table’ in my backup. Can you provide guidance on where it is stored and how to restore it please?

It’s possible that your WP database uses a different table prefix, anyway you should have a {prefix}_options table.
By the way our plugin does not perform any operation upon deactivation / activation, so if something broke up, it should depend on another plugin.

I also lost all the widgets I created with this plugin after deactivating/reactivating. I have a database backup so can recover the information, although that’s not really that easy because of all the escape characters in the SQL. But it’s better than nothing.

So I’m just posting to confirm the same behavior as the OP.

As I previously said, our plugin does not perform any operation upon deactivation / activation. This is made on purpose in order to preserve widgets content. If content was lost it probably depends on something else.

As for recovering data from backup, I would recommend to recover the full database dump to a temporary database/table, and then extract the BSTW data, which is contained in the wp_options table in the record having option_name = ‘widget_black-studio-tinymce’.

For further info, please read our FAQ at the section “Plugin’s data location and cleanup”.

I have no idea what caused it, but I’ve discovered it also happened to widgets created by a different plugin.

I appreciate the tip about importing the database file into a new db to be able to get the data without all the escape characters. That should save me some time for sure, so thanks!