It turns out that my journal entries were not totally obliterated, just temporarily inaccessible. With a bit of labor, I was able to recover all of the posts in my blog. In the process, I decided to move the blog from the Rainbow Missions leased server to a “free” account on WordPress.com. Although this has the unfortunate side effect of breaking all of the “permanent” links to the individual articles, it has the advantages of (1) upgrading to the latest version of WordPress software (2) someone else maintains the server and keeps the software updated, and (3) it saves me the trouble of trying to get Plesk, WordPress, and various web pages working together with the same version of PHP and other programs on the same server. I can minimize the pain of the broken links by making the old main blog URL automatically forward to this one. Now, I’ll run one of my favorite features of the latest version of WordPress: export of the whole blog to an XML file that can be imported to restore the whole thing, later. 🙂