I love analytics. Two days ago on Friday night or Saturday morning, I made a gzipped tarball clone of my blog’s entire directory on my server. I cloned everything, the WordPress files, my themes, my images, uploads – everything. I also cloned the database with mysqldump. I unarchived the tarball and restored the dump into my local development server. Great, so far, right?
I did the typical define("RELOCATE", true); in the wp-config.php file, along with the proper mysql credentials. Everything appeared to work when I logged into the admin panel on the local development server. I changed the site address because RELOCATE had already set the WordPress address to the proper URL: 192.168.0.5/blog-ryanrampersad/.
Everything worked. Everything was great.
Then; I thought it would make sense to turn off Jetpack, WP-DB-Backup, Google Analytics and WP Super Cache because those only need to run on a live server running the live blog. Right? How do I turn them off? I go into Plugins > Installed Plugins, checked the plugins I didn’t need anymore and simply deleted them the local development server.
I then proceeded to code up a new theme and do some tinkering, all safely and securely without messing with my live production blog. Or so I thought.
I logged into my admin panel today here, on my live production blog and look at what I discovered!
Notice only two days of data, not weeks or months!
The dashboard stats widget stated that I only two days of data. Well, maybe that was a fluke? So I check the full summary.
The stats summary agrees that there is only days of data
Even the monthly charts are wiped.
Monthly chart data claims only 31 views!
Okay, so great. It was a JetPack problem? So I go over to the JetPack section on WordPress stats and there’s no information there, in their feature card. On the bottom of the JetPack page, there’s a support link.
The JetPack support page has some common issues listed, but none of them were my issue of missing data. On the bottom, there’s a Contact Support link. That sounds promising. But clicking on it gets you a bunch of additional support avenues, none of which have anything to do with JetPack and WordPress.com Stats.
There wasn’t a final place with a real contact link.
Now, honestly, if I can’t get my data back, it is okay. It’s okay. I have Google Analytics and they are intact. Whatever caused this was my fault and if I can’t get my data back, I know now to do it a different way. WordPress is awesome and it’s great they bundle all those great plugins inside JetPack. WordPress.com Stats is fantastic too, it keeps tracks of less data than Google Analytics, but it presents it on the blog in the admin panel in a beautiful way.
Are there any solutions I should be looking for? Anything else? I’m not terribly desperate, but I felt this problem merited a good rant.
Thanks.
I do not use those plugins. However, you might want to look at any static files that these plugins store as temporary cache. Some of these files might directly affect the daily totals? Just a thought…
Hey there. I took a look in the Jetpack directory but there weren’t any obvious cache files. I cleared WP Super Cache but there wasn’t a difference.
First of all, you did a full backup (well done!), so the data is there, somewhere. Even if the uninstall of some plugin had deleted it, it would still be in the tarball or the sql dump.
My guess is that the data is stored in the database so I would start looking at a copy of the sql for where the data is stored, and then compare it with the live db. If it’s not there, look at the files, and so on. (Oh, yes, the other option is to actually search some documentation on *where* is it stored)
If the old data was deleted from your server, figure out by whom. If it is still at your home server, you need to check why it is not showing (eg. it could index it for each url, and consider that a different blog).
Good luck
I am pretty sure there is no data stored in the database, otherwise there wouldn’t be a need to sign into WordPress.com when using JetPack.
I had the exact same thing happen, and I’m pretty ticked about it. Found your post when researching it. The weird thing is that I installed Jetpack on four sites, and three of them could access the old stats just fine. But the fourth – which was the most important one, with half a million pageviews per day in some cases – all gone. Poof.
Their statistics system seems fragile. I’ve messed up those stats at least twice this year by ‘mistakes on my part’.
There seems to be some sort of numeric blog identifier that WordPress.com uses behind the scenes to connect to Stats/JetPack. I know that when I copied my in-production blog to a development environment several months ago, my Stats page suddenly started showing the development blog’s name. It seems to be picking up the right statistics, but I can’t fix the way it’s listed in WordPress.com. I submitted a support query about 24 hours ago and haven’t heard back yet. They really need to update their documentation on this – it’s incredibly confusing.
If you manage to get through to WordPress about this issue, please leave another comment. I’m sure everyone’s interested. My attempt at contact Jetpack fell on deaf ears.
Apparently what you need to do is deactivate the regular WP stats plugin first, and then activate and connect JetPack… However, that didn’t work for me (I suspect because I have several blogs linked to my 1 WP.com account). But, if you contact support at http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/?jetpack=needs-service apparently the staff are pretty good at responding and fixing any problems…
That’s great to know. Thanks!
I ran into the same problem the day before yesterday when I was updating wp and plugins. I deactivated Jetpack and activated it again, I think it was then I lost all stats since 2008. Too bad.. I tried getting support from them but no answer yet. If they have a daily backup I’d love to have at least the raw data for the stats..
Did you hear anything from them or make some other discoveries concerning this?
Unfortunately, I have not had any more progress in finding my original stats. Luckily, I had Google Analytics enabled since before the dawn of time, so I still have them all anyway. The overhead of running two statistics tools is greater, but the piece of mind for actually having stats continuously is worth it. You might try asking around in the IRC channel too. They’ve been helpful with other problems.
Good luck!
Hi again,
You can probably view your old stats like I can. Just find the old blog_id and visit:
https://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=stats&blog=xxx
where xxx is blog-id.
I solved the problem in this thread:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/jetpack-stats-lost
Good luck!!