Lost blog

September 28, 2006 8:03 PM

A friend has (accidentally) deleted a blog on Blogspot. If Blogspot says they can't bring it back, is there some other way to bring it back from the great beyond?

Methods already tried include searching the Google archives and the Wayback machine. Is there any other place we might find a cache, or something else that can be done? Five years of posts were deleted. No backups were made, as far as I know.

This blog details a struggle with a serious illness and the potential loss of this blog is devastating to this person. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

posted by divka to computers & internet (14 comments total)

I deleted a pair of blogs almost a year ago and I still have a link in the dashboard to "Restore access to this blog." I wouldn't panic.
posted by BackwardsCity at 8:07 PM on September 28, 2006

Could you find it via another search engine's cache, such as yahoo, msn, etc? My first thougt was going to be google, but.... you've already tried that...
posted by twiggy at 10:14 PM on September 28, 2006

Internet Wayback Machine

I'd give it a try, it has lots of records, just hope it got crawled.
posted by gregschoen at 12:29 AM on September 29, 2006

Whoops, delete that, I should have actually read the "More Inside" section.
posted by gregschoen at 12:29 AM on September 29, 2006

Have you tried accessing the archive URLs? I deleted a Blogspot blog YEARS ago and last I checked you could still read some of the archive pages even though someone else had taken the ______.blogspot.com URL that I used to use.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:14 AM on September 29, 2006

I don't know how helpful this is, since it requires a Google API key and some reasonably advanced computer skills, but you might be able to retrieve the site with this tool: Warrick is a command-line utility for reconstructing or recovering a website when a back-up is not available. Warrick will search the Internet Archive, Google, MSN, and Yahoo for stored pages and images and will save them to your filesystem. I know you already tried Google and archive.org, but this will automate the process and might dig something up in the long run.

Really hope your friend can recover his/her writings. Best of luck.
posted by mumble at 3:11 AM on September 29, 2006

If it was me and I was this desparate I would try offering Blogspot money to retrieve my content. I'm sure they have a copy of it somewhere if not only for disaster recovery purposes. But at this point it's not worth their time to get it for you.
posted by dgeiser13 at 4:26 AM on September 29, 2006

When you say "..blogspot says they can't get it back" do you mean that using the blogger interface and help system brings you/your friend to this point?

Or do you mean that you/your friend wrote to blogger/google and explained how important retrieval of the blog contents is? Because I would definitely want a human being at blogger to have responded before giving up/going with the 'chasing remnants' methods through caches.
posted by peacay at 7:25 AM on September 29, 2006

I would try offering Blogspot money to retrieve my content.

Since Google has about ten billion dollars in cash, I'd hazard a guess that money won't factor into their motivations.
posted by camcgee at 10:52 AM on September 29, 2006

try this. i found stuff i'd thought was deleted (intentional deletion)

The query cache:url will display Google's cached version of a web page, instead of the current version of the page. For example, [ cache:www.eff.org ] will show Google's cached version of the Electronic Frontier Foundation home page.

Note: Do not put a space between cache: and the URL (web address).

On the cached version of a page, Google will highlight terms in your query that appear after the cache: search operator. For example, [ cache:www.pandemonia.com/flying/ fly diary ] will show Google's cached version of Flight Diary in which Hamish Reid's documents what's involved in learning how to fly with the terms "fly" and "diary" highlighted.
posted by Davaal at 3:43 PM on September 29, 2006

If anyone is reading your feed in a web-based feed reader like Bloglines or Rojo, they may have an archive of the posts there. You can also try searching for your blog URL on services like Technorati or IceRocket to see if they've archived your posts.
posted by anildash at 5:50 PM on September 30, 2006

> Since Google has about ten billion dollars in cash, I'd hazard a guess that money won't factor into
> their motivations.

You're going to tell me if I offered them $10,000 to get me my content they might not help me out? I don't know how much $ the poster has but it doesn't hurt to ask. There's a difference between being truly unable to retrieve the info from a technical standpoint and just not wanting to make retrieval a regular thing for people using your free blog hosting service.
posted by dgeiser13 at 10:07 AM on October 4, 2006

You're going to tell me if I offered them $10,000 to get me my content they might not help me out?

Yes, even for $10,000 they might not help you out.
posted by camcgee at 10:04 AM on October 6, 2006

They might not but they might. And as long as it's not technically "gone" then I don't think it would hurt to ask if you have the money to spare.
posted by dgeiser13 at 3:14 PM on October 26, 2006