Split: Backups and archives

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 8:35 pm

I got the page with the main index with all the sections expanded from google's cache at:

Page breaking link tucked under text - JMS

The thing is searching google's cache for the pages and I've tried some things and forum headers won't do, even though it is text on the page. Getting a list for anything from the site would be good, but I'm not sure how to do it.

Socar · Post by **Socar** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 8:52 pm

Jedi Master Spock wrote:Third, I e-mailed Matt Carpenter earlier, and he said his database no longer exists; his host just up and deleted it when he closed the site, so there's no hope of getting an archive of the Digital Breakdown board hosted anywhere.

I had a feeling this was going to be the case. May this be a lesson to all who run forums, back up your database on a regular basis. Seriously, it's quite easy to do with a phpbb board, and often times your web space provider will have a way of backing up your entire space as well.

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 9:10 pm

Is google the only search engine that caches the pages of sites?

Socar · Post by **Socar** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 9:17 pm

GStone wrote:The thing is searching google's cache for the pages and I've tried some things and forum headers won't do, even though it is text on the page. Getting a list for anything from the site would be good, but I'm not sure how to do it.

From what I can tell, Google only has about 8 actual pages from Digital Breakdown in their cache, including the index page, the rules, the index page again (except this time with a lot of of the forum categories collapsed), who is online page, a log in page, the FAQ page, "Closing of the "Luke Skywalker vs Enterprise Crew"" (which only has 4 posts in it), and the HK-47 vs Data" thread (which only has 2 pages).

So basically, Google has pretty much next to nothing of value in their cache concerning the Digital Breakdown forums.

GStone wrote:Is google the only search engine that caches the pages of sites?

Yahoo does as well, but I couldn't even find -anything- from the Digital Breakdown forums in Yahoo's search results.

Post by **Mike DiCenso** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 9:25 pm

If Matt didn't take the time to backup or otherwise archive the site, then in all likelyhood you won't find much of value. But from the "snapshot" of the forum main index page, it looks like that forum was moderately busy.

I would trust that JMS is taking steps to properly archive this forum to protect against any possible loss, accidental or otherwise.
-Mike

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 9:42 pm

I have seen where some cached pages don't even show up with a general, advanced search and more pages come up when you have something more specific. But, I've even tried words, like "message", "posted" and others and still nothing. According the the index page that came up, there are only 22 threads in the pure discussion forum, as of June, but it'd be good to still get them. It seems only a miracle would let us get them now.

Post by **Jedi Master Spock** » Thu Sep 21, 2006 11:59 pm

Mike DiCenso wrote:I would trust that JMS is taking steps to properly archive this forum to protect against any possible loss, accidental or otherwise.
-Mike

Yes.

Have you tried the Wayback Machine? That might actually have cached the whole thing at one point in time.

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 12:21 am

I tried both digital-breakdown.com and digital-breakdown.com/debate/ and got nothing. I thought the wayback machine was archived online by those that want their stuff saved. Maybe they have something else where they automatically save it.

Nonamer · Post by **Nonamer** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 3:45 pm

Doesn't the phpBB2 forum software have it's own backup system? If you find this board to be very important you should use backup religiously.

Post by **Jedi Master Spock** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 3:57 pm

Nonamer wrote:Doesn't the phpBB2 forum software have it's own backup system? If you find this board to be very important you should use backup religiously.

Why, yes, it does. Quite convenient - one click, and your database is all backed up. I use it fairly often.

Socar · Post by **Socar** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 4:57 pm

GStone wrote:I thought the wayback machine was archived online by those that want their stuff saved. Maybe they have something else where they automatically save it.

Not really. The Wayback Machine works similar to a search engine crawler (like Google-bot). You however -can- set it to where it can't archive your pages, but otherwise it will do so automatically. The only thing is that unlike Google, The Wayback Machine won't crawl nearly as often, which means that unless your site has been up for a significant period of time (for some reason it takes the Wayback Machine quite a while before it even figures out that something exists), it probably won't get archived. Such seems to be the case with Digital Breakdown.

Post by **Mike DiCenso** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 8:01 pm

I tried to find the Strek-v-Swars.net forum pages, but had no luck whatsoever. :-(
-Mike

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 8:31 pm

Well, are there any others besides google, yahoo and the wayback machine that archives sites?

Socar · Post by **Socar** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 8:49 pm

Wow, I rule.

Go to http://www.gigablast.com and then type in "digital-breakdown.com" (quotations unnecessary) and then search. You may have to scroll down the page a bit, but eventually you should see results for the forums, cached. I haven't had a chance to really look through all that is there, so I'm not sure what all we have, but it's better than nothing! If you increase the results to 100 per page, it should be a lot easier to view.

GStone · Post by **GStone** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:55 pm

Okay, how did you find this one? I was fresh out of ideas.

I looked down it and there are only a few relevent links that aren't much help. I saw one linked to SDN and I thought it said MPC recovering forum and it was "recovering from". I thought it was something about archiving his forum, but I figured out what it was after reading the OP, but I kept reading and found a lot of humorous harpooning they were doing to me. I was dying with laughter.