A New Beginning

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Some of you may be wondering why I appear to have dropped off the face of the online world with my blog inaccessible (it's back, sort of) and e-mail being bounced back (please send again), it's like overnight I became a virtual hermit.


About a week ago, my web hosting company (WebHostPlus/Netbunch/Dr2.net) got hacked to such a degree that servers were wiped, and backups were unavailable. The web hosting company seemed to be doing some firefighting and giving me some support within the first 24 hours, and then they just dropped off the face of the earth and gave up. Since then, I've been on my own, independently recovering and rebuilding the site. Within the first 48 hours I managed to recover 90% of the files that comprised the entries of www.mikehuang.com by pulling files manually off the google cache. Time was of the essence, as files do not stay in the google cache for long. (I also learned that google has a limit of 1000 entries displayed for a query, and how to manipulate the search string to pull specific files from the cache). Mainly what I was interested in recovering were the blog entries. Since I've been blogging almost daily for almost 4 years, this blog constitutes my largest written work.


About an hour after I've completed manually recovering 1,400 files from the google cache, kwc informs me of an automated tool called Warrick which will pull files from the caches of MSN, Yahoo, Google and the Wayback Machine. Warrick works wonderfully, allowing me to get some hours of sleep instead of tediously pulling files off the cache one by one, and also because Warrick manages to find files I've forgotten about. Because of the 1000 query limit by the Google API, Warrick is slow -- after two days of pulling files off, there are just a little over 2,000 files recovered, with many thousands more to go.


The plan for the moment is that I will re-add the entries as time allows, re-adding the old entries back to the current blog until the blog has been fully restored. It gives me a chance to revise the website and the blog, which I'll be looking forward to, once I have time.

2 Comments

I am a Netbunch refugee too. Lost my blog (5 years data) and some other friends blogs that i "hosted"...I followed the same process as you manualy grabbing my items from GG cache. Then I wrote a PHP script to grab the items and comments from the cache files, and repopulate my blog.I am going to try this Warrick for my friends blogs. Thanks for the link ;-)

My sympathies. I hope Warrick helps. It's been doing a fine job so far (just a little slow).

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