All my posts. Everything from the last 7+ years. Gone.
My host sent an email out in mid-October saying they were rebuilding the server and they were A) advising everyone to create a ticket to have their site temporarily moved to another server while the server was being rebuilt, and B) to back up their data. I did both. I wondered why they would need ME to create a ticket to have them move my site, but I figured, hey, they’re cheap, so you get what you pay for. Their support is responsive, and their features are fantastic, but the reliability is crap.
I’ve been meaning to switch to a new host for a while but haven’t had time. My @goaliegirl email has been intermittently down for months, and inoperable for a few weeks. Thank goodness for gMail and my IT Consulting site (hosted at Pair). So yesterday I sit down to take the plunge. I couldn’t log in to my account. Nothing is working. Huh? I log in to the host’s support ticket system to create a ticket and I notice that my previous ticket is still open. Odd. I open it and realize they updated the ticket after they moved my site saying that I was past due on the invoice (it’s yearly). I never got an email or any other kind of notification saying an invoice was due, nor did I ever get notified that it was past due. I surmise my account has been canceled.
I sent a request to them to reactivate my account due to the fact I was never informed of a payment being due.
I signed up for a new host (Bluehost) and started preparing to transfer my data. I had a backup anyway so it was no big deal. Or so I thought. Apparently my backup was corrupted. Or something. I only have about 8 months of data in my database file.
Long story short, even after paying my invoice and getting my account re-activated, my data isn’t there.
I’m not going to dwell on this. There’s nothing else I can do about it. I’ve tried everything to get it back. Re-download from the old site, look through every single backup I have…
I figure this is a good time for a clean slate. I don’t really give a hoot about any SEO value on this site so all my content that’s missing can just return 404’s. Or I can 301 to this nice post. 
Moral of the story: You get what you pay for.
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Hey Goalie Girl.
Go to The Wayback Machine. You should be able to grab some of your entries from there. At least the ones up to June 30, 2007.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.goaliegirl.com/
I know. You can thank me later
You’ll have to cut and paste the whole link since it looks like it doesn’t like the two http’s in the same link.
I actually did that the last time I lost a couple of years of data. I’ll probably do it again, but it’s pretty time consuming.
Thanks for the tip!