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.
Pinboard.in crawls and stores people's bookmarks as a paid service.
A number of Pinboard users had bookmarked articles from Atwood's site before the data loss, so I had a stored copy of all the page content and dependencies for those articles.
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.
His biggest problem appears to be the images (and possibly other resources included in the pages). It's pretty much a given he'll be able to recover the text itself.
There are many, many images in the pinboard archive, a couple of hundred posts' worth. I don't know if he also has other sources from which to retrieve them, he doesn't seem to have grabbed them from pinboard yet. But a good chunk of his stuff will be recovered, images and all.
He wrote a blog post (maybe more than one) about how he was hosting his images from Amazon S3. Did he not follow through, or did he switch away from that?
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.
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.)
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.