Possible bug? After updating to 2.4.0 it looks like all cached images are gone

Same has happened to me. My broken link checker suddenly flagged 260 missing images.

I can see WP-o-Matic was updated on my system on the 11th of May. The only items in my cache now are posts created post-update.

Hopefully we have a backup to restore the folder from !

I am trying to confirm this, but I suspect plugin upgrades generally recursively delete the existing plugin folder and installs the new version fresh. ie there should only be core code in a plugin folder.
Unfortunately, WP-o-matic stored its cache under the plugin folder and that has been lost due to the upgrade.

I have no connection to the plugin author but I will share my recovery experience to assist anyone finding the same problem.

First thing to realise is that the files have gone from your system. There is not a quick fix to restore them.

To recover from this loss, you will need to recover from a backup if you have one. This folder only “/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/”.
Rename the existing folder first, you do not want to lost any files since the upgrade. Merge these back into the recovered folder.

You will still be missing files between the backup date and the upgrade date. I personally lost files between 8th Apr and 10th May. Grrr.

It is a long time since I configured WP-o-matic, but I am sure it will be possible to tell it to reload articles. I will let you know what I find.

There is a mechanism that WP-o-matic uses to know it has already posted an article. The problem is that this record remains if the post is deleted, and the plugin provides no means to remove the already published record.

In order to restore broken pages originally created by WP-O-Matic, I found I had to manually delete the appropriate records from the sp_wpo_campaign_post table. I would not recommend this unless you are an experienced php/mysql programmer.

After making that adjustment, I reset each campaign and did a fetch. Of course, it will only restore what is available on the RSS feed.

A summary for the attention of the WP-o-Matic developers…..
WP-o-matic should use a different folder for cache
Remove the hash when an article is deleted.
Also remove the cached image when an article is deleted.
Consider adding images to the media library instead.

YES this happened to me too….you’ll need to go to your last backup and upload all the cached images and then it’ll be all restored and images will appear again.

I suspect plugin upgrades generally recursively delete the existing plugin folder and installs the new version fresh

Argh – not true, is it?

I didn’t expect that and of course didn’t backup my data ??
Is there any chance to find out a mapping of the original file location to the renamed files in cache/ from the database? This way I could restore the lost files with a little wget and mv magic – at least the files where the source is still present.

Cheers!

Always have a daily backup before upgrading anything.

Your articles will still contain the link to the missing cache file, so it will be possible to rebuild the cache manually. But not an easy task if you have lots missing.

@azpub, you say have a daily backup but you also have to be lucky to discover a problem before the backups expire. I have daily/monthly backups. My daily ones did not go back far enough and the monthly for May was made the day after the update. I had to go back to April and lost a month.

@mortimercat — Yes, I’ve had the very same issue losing stuff due to not having current backups now I tend to backup and review content immediately when doing upgrades. Backups have saved me from a lot of headaches. I learned the hard way too.