In desperation I email Bluehost, my previous hosting provider, begging and pleading for them to see if they could retrieve a backup. Not that long later, I got the following response: Dear Andy, Thank you for verifying the correct password information. We understand your concern and have good news. Accounts are actually deleted about 10 days past the expiration date. Since your account expired on 09/17/2010, it has not yet been deleted. We suggest logging into your account and renewing for 1 month. This will allow you to access your files and make proper backups. Thank you, Kimberlee Billing Specialist…
‘What about one of your previous backups?’ I hear you ask. Great idea I say. Trouble is, the most recent good backup I have, is dated October 3rd 2006. Bugger. Ok, what about archive.org? Not great, but there are twenty versions of my site, mainly from 2007. That’s good, as that was when I was travelling the world and my site was getting most traffic (hence archive.org deemed it important enought to take an archive). Not ideal, but it is a good start. In steps Sash. A generation Y work colleague and someone who has a better grasp of Google…
I didn’t and now I’ve lost all of the content for whereisandy.net, shesagoa.com and mongolmini.com/returns. Bollocks! Migrating from one hosting provider to another (in the interest of saving a few pennies) I failed to check the condition of the database downloads and get them installed on the new hosting server before the old account expired. Eight or so databases came down ok, but three didn’t, due to masses of spam filling up one table and breaking the download. Typically, the of those three damaged databases, one of them had to be whereisandy.net. Every blog entry from this site lost. All…