Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Santa Google

After beefing off about Google in my last post, I have to get down on my knees to thank it for its data policies during this Christmas season.

This morning, I discovered that the blog, Sooz Nooz, appended to my main website, had disappeared. Aghast, I checked the files on the server. They had gone. The admin files were still there but the entries and the photos had disappeared.

Now whether this was down to a server error, lax site security on my part, or a hack attack, I still don't know at this point.

It's a bit of a grind, but I can restore the templates and the CSS. It was the entries that I had lost. Of course, I hadn't backed up. BIG mistake.

But Google had. I have recovered all of the entries thanks to Google's inestimable thoroughness in caching the pages that it has crawled. Sooz Nooz disappeared at some time between 23rd December when it last cached the site, and today.

And I have recovered the changes that I had made to the source code in the sidebar.

The other Christmas present from Google was for my son George. He had received 3 Warhammer games as presents. When he loaded the first one, it froze in the DVD tray because it had detected emulation software on his PC which he uses to mount a virtual drive with the game software.

Half an hour of Googling brought him the solution. By downloading Demon Tools and a patch, he's been able to install and play these games without problem.

'What,' he said, 'would I have done without Google on Christmas Day?'

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