what to do when your ISP deletes your weblog
Thursday, March 25th, 2004Last week my ISP deleted my weblog.
I had asked them to downgrade my account from an ADSL account to something cheaper while I am in India. So they did, and in the process deleted the cgi space and MySql database that was hosting the weblog. Partly it is my fault, since (a) I didn’t keep my own backup and (b) I didn’t spell out for them in big block letters : DO NOT REMOVE THE 2 1/2 YEARS WORTH OF CONTENT. You’d think they might notice that it existed before going ahead and deleting it without a backup though. After all, even windows has an “Are you sure”.
So there I was with no backup of quite a lot of personal and professional thoughts and memories.
Fortunately Google has a really cool feature that allows you to see the latest cached version of any site in their index. As you can see if you do this query they archive quite a lot of stuff - my whole site included!
So a few days and lines of ruby later, I now have a newly retrieved webblog, hosted courtesy of my friend Damian Murphy.
Needless to say, I am also writing a script to regularly back it up…
