

Jeff Atwood asks for help restoring a site from Internet caches - RyanMcGreal
http://superuser.com/questions/82036/recovering-a-lost-website-with-no-backup

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idlewords
I found about 200 of his pages (with images and other dependencies) in the
Pinboard archives, and forwarded them along to the guy.

I wonder if there is a nice market niche for a 'panic button' recovery tool
that scrapes web caches, internet archive and so on immediately after you lose
a site.

~~~
pavs
So If I were to make a business out of this, would you sue me for stealing
your idea ala TC? :)

~~~
idlewords
Just give me a freebie when all my stuff disappears and I'll call it even.

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pavs
So we have a legally binding contract then? Awesome!

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niyazpk
I posted a solution here (<http://bit.ly/4AGCju>) (to get back the images),
but looks like nobody likes it. May be that was a bad way to approach the
problem.

Anyway I am looking forward to more news on how they are going to resolve the
issue.

~~~
karanbhangui
I saw this on superuser too ([http://superuser.com/questions/82036/recovering-
a-lost-websi...](http://superuser.com/questions/82036/recovering-a-lost-
website-with-no-backup)), i'm assuming it was you. fairly clever solution :)

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xenophanes
it's easy to retrieve google caches with a ruby script. here's one i used in
the past:

<http://pastie.org/739757>

edit: if you use this, add a sleep! whoops. i didn't get banned though, shrug.

~~~
pronoiac
Warrick works better for that, at least:
<http://warrick.cs.odu.edu/warrick.html>

It sleeps in between queries, so you don't get temporarily banned from Google.

I think it's not currently working for Yahoo or MSN/Bing. Fixing that might be
easier than doing everything else manually.

Edit: I've gotten a response from Frank McCown, creator of Warrick, that he's
looking into it.

Edit 2: He'll try to update it next week.

~~~
tectonic
Warrick looks like exactly what he needs.

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wglb
Old saying is "If it ain't tested, is is broken." Old corollary: "If it is
tested, it might still be broken." And: "If it is a backup, it might still be
broken."

Seems like a good idea to occasionally spend the time and totally fill a
sparkley clean image with your backups and see how well it fares.

My sympathies.

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thorax
Yeah, time to double-check your own backup procedures, everyone. You don't
want to be posting similar questions, right?

Remember the old saying: if you haven't tested restoring your backups, then
you don't really have backups. (Not that I've ever been good about this
myself.)

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brc
sorry would help but I'm off to do a backup

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pan69
I guess no podcast this weekend.

~~~
pavs
This weeks podcast: How to empathize when someone screws up.

Edit: from his tweet -

"on the podcast this week (unpublished, because I suck) @spolsky and I
discussed "worst case scenario" biz outcomes. prophetic!"

<http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/6582023681>

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thras
These seem to be up on archive.org through 2008. The rest are available
through Google Reader.

