Wandering Soul

It was a case of miscommunication with my server admin. A minor oversight in my mail that wiped out my entire website! There was nothing left on the server, nothing at all. No blog, no photoblog, no website.

I was in a state of shock when I checked my website. I could see months of work going down the drain. It was a disaster. I did not know where to start. There was no way I could get my blogs back… Or was there?

I started thinking. And then I got a brainwave. Google should have most of the blog in its cache. That was the key. I promptly checked Google Cache by typing cache:blog.kedarsule.com in the searchbox. Lo and behold, there it was. I started checking the cache for each of my category. I could not get posts which were deeper than third page for each category, but whatever, I could get most of them back. One thing I could not get back completely were the comments, but then I couldn’t help it. I decided to make the most of whatever I could retrieve, and copied it into a word file.

Now that I had to put my blog back together, I decided to spend some time on the design front. So what you are seeing is the new version of my old blog. I have also created new categories for writing my travelogues. I have treated my photoblog to some design treatment as well. I also went on a naming spree. My blog is now called Wandering Soul and the photoblog is called Shades of Light.

So here I am, recovered from a major disaster. There are two main learnings here:

1. Be very, very careful while communicating with your Server Admin. Don’t take things for granted.
2. If you are stupid like me and manage to get your website erased, use Google Cache to recover as much data as you can. But please keep in mind that this method will work only for a short time after your site goes down. Because, once the Google spider crawls your website, and finds nothing there, it will erase your website’s data from its database.