Recovering Diary-X posts

February 26, 2006 4:09 PM

Is there any good way to try to recover a journal that was on Diary-X?

My girlfriend has several years of journal posts that were on Diary-X and lost all of them in the great Diary-X harddrive crash of ought-6. We've tried checking the wayback machine, but it only has 4 of her posts. Are there other ways to retrieve her posts off the internet (for example, a good way to hunt and peck google cache?)?

posted by drezdn to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Not sure if you'd already tried this, but the way to return a Google listing for all results in a given directory is with "site:" — so use a query with just "site:diary-x.com/username" or "username.diaryx.com" or whatever the format is.
posted by rafter at 4:51 PM on February 26, 2006

Going to Diary-X.com reveals this- ouch. So sorry this happened.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 5:31 PM on February 26, 2006 [1 favorite]

For some reason Google never liked Diary-X and cached very few of its pages. Looking for cached pages on MSN and Yahoo search is a much better bet. I typed in my D-X address into MSN (typing "username.diary-x.com" directly into the search engine), and found it had cached 44 of my journal entries. And Yahoo has several hundred of my entries, compared to zero from Google.

Some people in the DX community who've been discussing the crash have been using web.archive.org (I'm assuming that's the same as the Wayback Machine, though, so that probably doesn't help you).

I'm sorry for your girlfriend's loss.
posted by Chanther at 8:24 PM on February 26, 2006