A week or so ago I decided to move to a new hosting company. Mostly change for the sake of change. (Oh, that reminds me, did I mention I quit my job too?).
I use my personal site primarily for hosting my blog and my son's baby pictures (essentially as an online baby book). To date I've never backed up my website - assuming naively that my hosting company was archiving my assets on a regular basis.
During the process of using a web based ftp tool to migrate my files from my old host to the new - I accidently hit the imposing "DELETE" button (/public_html) - and for some reason unbeknownst to me - I also accepted the "REALLY? ARE YOU SURE?" prompt as well - engrossed in some YouTube I guess. All files - gone. A quick phone call to my provider came up empty - they had no tools in house for recovering data on shared servers.
Damage control (wife and mother-in-law not very happy) ensues. I decided to explorer how many of the "echoes" from my website still existed in the various caches online (and off) - in hopes of recovering at least a subset of the site.
The blog itself was trivial to recover - a simple "republish" from Blogger.com and it was magically restored. Unfortunately without any of the embedded images, MP3s, and flash assets - as obviously Blogger is oblivious to associated media.
My first stop was my home machine - which turned up nothing immediately given the fact that I'd recently cleaned my desktop off. So next up were my browser caches (IE and Firefox) on each of my PCs. I was able to recover about 20% of the supporting art for my blog and my son's page.
I borrowed a tool from a friend and performed some forensics on the AOL client Topspeed web accelerator cache - there I found a few more images.
I hit up Google.com and found a number of my images with their image search tool - but their thumbnail sizes are awful - only a few proved reusable. I had better luck with Live.com - as their cached image size is at least a bit larger. Unfortunately in both cases, any animated GIFs are converted to static JPGs in their databases.
Google again proved useful for recovering HTML documents that weren't related to my blog. I was able to recover a few whitepapers and documents I was hosting via the Google cache. (If anyone is wondering I did not have much luck with sites such as the wayback machine).
I haven't had any luck at
all finding any of my MP3s, SWFs, or FLV videos. If anyone knows of a search engine - or data mining site out there that might possibly have stumbled across my little site in the past, please let me know.
