Deleted your Help Center content? Not to worry!

Backstory

If, like myself, you have at one point or another run into the problem that you accidentally deleted some Categories, Sections or Articles from your Help Center then, up until recently, Zendesk was able to help out by restoring the data.

Unfortunately Zendesk recently made the decision to implement a new policy which can be viewed here. In short, they will no longer restore any data that was deleted as a result of a mistake or incorrect use. 

Now I'm sure you might be thinking "Well what am I going to do now if I accidentally delete some content?" and that is a very good question. I was in the same boat until I remembered, Google caches nearly everything! 

So I've gone ahead and included some steps below which allowed me to get nearly 100% of my content back. Please keep in mind that there is a little work involved in doing so, but it certainly beats having to recreate all content from scratch.

How it works

Google caches nearly every page on the internet it's crawlers can reach so I used this to my advantage. I had recently generated a sitemap of our help center so this made life a lot easier for me. 

Step 1: Getting the cached copies of your Help Articles

If you have a sitemap of your help center:

1. Open your sitemap.xml file 
2. Copy each article URL into the address bar of your browser 
3. Prefix the article URL with http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:

E.g. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:{domain}.zendesk.com/hc/{localisation}/articles/{article ID}

 

If you don't have a sitemap of your help center:

1. Prefix the base address of your help center with Google's caching URL e.g. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.{domain}.zendesk.com/hc/
2. Once you visit the cached help center home page you have the option of selecting your deleted Section, Category or Help Article
3. You will then be displayed with a 'Page not found' error but that's OK
4. Prefix the URL in the address bar with http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:
5. This will then retrieve the cached copy of that Category, Section or Help Article

Using either of the above methods you should end up with your article page being displayed like shown below. Note: Please keep in mind that your help center may be styled differently but that does not matter for this guide.

 

Step 2: Recreating the content

Now that you can see the cached page go ahead and follow the steps below to get your content back:

1. Select the 'View source' option at the top of the cached page
2. Press CTRL + F and enter the following into the Search bar, this will bring you to the section where the articles content is

   <div class="content-body article-body">

3. Copy everything between the opening and closing <div> of that section, highlighted in red below (Article Content). You can also get the original Article Heading from the sources which is highlited in red above the Article Content
4. Go to your help center and choose to Add a new Article
5. Now select the Source Code < > button
6. Paste the content you copied earlier into the Source Code window
7. Click OK, you should now see your content populated in the Content section
8. Enter the original Title for the article
9. Select a Section to add the article to
10. Select the Add button

That's it! Now simply repeat the above steps for any other articles you wish to retrieve.

 

Some things to note

• This only works for content that was publicly accessible.
• If the content is brand new and it was removed, Google may not have cached the pages yet which means this method may not work for you.
• If the content has not received some amount of traffic, it's likely that Google has not cached anything on that HC. 
• It's possible that even if the main HC page has been cached, individual articles might not have been. 
• Although this method will allow you to get your content back, images that were used in articles cannot be retrieved this way.
• If you have links from one article to another and between it's important to update the links of those articles that were restored as they now have a new article ID.
• I am certain that it is possible to create a tool that will do all this for you but I do not have the time to create one. If anyone has the time and is willing to put in the effort it's definitely possible to create a tool that can retrieve deleted content from cached copies on the web and then restore them to the help center.
• A Zendesk rep provided me with a link to a help article that goes through how to backup your help center content, something I will definitely be doing from now on. You can find the article here.

I hope this article has helped you out! Let me know if you have any feedback or know of another way to retrieve help center content.