Lost sidebar and EZ Footer widgets

[HollyKnott]

After switching my theme to Twenty Seventeen to do some WooCommerce debugging, and switching back to Genesis and Dynamik, all of my sidebar and EZ Footer widgets are missing. They're not in the Inactive widgets section to drag back over. This also happened on another G/D site yesterday. I have BackupBuddy backups and BB lets you restore certain components so you don't have to restore the site in entirety... so I am wondering what files I would look for to restore for the sidebar widgets and EZ Footer widgets.

Also, any tips on preventing this from happening next time are welcome!

Edited to add - I found the database rollback in BackupBuddy, but the process failed because an identifier name is too long. Any tips on how to restore widgets inside the DB itself manually are welcome, if that's even possible.

[SiGa]

Fear I can´t help much here. See here (and similar threads on Stackoverflow):
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/q...eleted-widgets
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...e-lost-forever

If you do have a database backup you could try to extract just the table in question.

I never had my widgets disappear when changing themes, always found them in the section you mentioned or in "Inactive Sidebar" section. I often drag them out manually before changing themes.
A good method to avoid problems is to use a widget exporter plugin which gives you a backup of all your widgets before changing themes, just in case...

[HollyKnott]

Hi SiGa,

Thanks for those links above. I found one of them earlier but was afraid to tackle the DB. You may laugh, but I wound up taking one of the BackupBuddy backups and duplicating the site on one of my test servers, and then manually copying and pasting the HTML from the widgets from the test site back to the other site.

I did some experimenting first, though. I wondered if it was a bug with the Black Studio TinyMCE plugin I use for the widgets, because 2 of the WooCommerce widgets did remain in place on the sidebar during my theme changes and plugin deactivations. So I added a new Visual Editor instance (from Black Studio TinyMCE), added some content, and changed the theme to 2017 back to Dynamik and all was well. I found some sites that talked about how sometimes these widgets get lost if you deactivate plugins first, then change the theme, so maybe it's more of a sequence of events thing.

Thanks for that tip on using a widget exporter plugin - had no idea such a thing existed!