Silapaahaan.com : The present state of affairs...

As I've said a couple times now, my site was "accidentally" wiped out by a webhosting robot last week, and it doesn't look like there is any backup. To make matters even worse, the backed up files I had, which were the original source files, were lost when my desktop computer hard drive crashed earlier this year.

So...

...for the time being, at least, I am flying my flag at half-mast.

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Sazerac somehow managed to track down cached copies of the website menus themselves, and I'm sure that he can provide links when time permits. And, remember, a simple keyword search here will reveal my Thai Avenue menu translation, my Rosded menu translation, my Dharma Garden menu translations, and my translations of the current menus at Spoon and TAC.

E.M.

P.S. If you have suggestions, etc., please direct them to me via p.m. or email. Thanks.

I know that some people have restored their websites thru cached Google pages...

Sorry, Erik M. - no suggestions. Just plenty of condolences!

That's simply horrible news! I don't even live in Chicago but I can hardly begin to guess what a loss this is.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this situation is somehow still recitifiable.

That's terrible Erik. Your loss is all our loss.

A couple years ago my hard drive crashed, and along with all the other valueable data, I lost thousands of family photos. Despite my best intentions, I had no back ups. I couldn't afford the large cost of having the data recovered at the time, so I put the computer away for when my ship came in.

When it became apparent that there was no ship coming, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I know this sounds crazy, but it worked for me and I did it to my sisters computer soon after, and saved her data too.

I removed the hard drive from the computer, put it in a ziploc bag, and put it in the freezer for three hours. Very quickly, I reinstalled the hard drive and was able to recover most of the data before the drive stopped spinning. Repeating the procedure, I retrieved most of everything of importance.

This is not urban legend. I've done it twice. It makes sense too. When the drive is cold, the components shrink, perhaps allowing enough play to spin. As the drive heats up, it seizes again.

It's been several years since then with a new computer and I've stupidly yet to back up anything. At least my computer now has two hard drives that run in parralel -- so I should be safe from a hard drive crash, but a virus could still wipe me out. Don't we ever learn?

-ramon

Yep, the freezer trick really does work sometimes. Do be sure to use a bag if you try it, though. And it's not for those who aren't comfortable with the guts of a PC.

Update:

Most of my pics (January '07 ---> Present) have been restored...

E.M.

Erik M. wrote:Update:

Most of my pics (January '07 ---> Present) have been restored...

E.M.

That's good to hear. For the benefit of others who may find themselves in a similar situation,
there's a tool called Warrick.

http://www.cs.odu.edu/~fmccown/research/lazy/warrick.html

"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."