Some of you may have noticed that most of the images on my blog have been missing for some time. Actually, if I’m honest, I very much doubt if anyone has noticed. Let’s face it, who reads blog posts from last year? Hmm? Anyone? No, I thought not. Nonetheless, the images were missing, and it was only this evening that I managed to resolve the issue.
The problem started when I moved from my old hosting provider, PearTreeUK, to my new hosting provider, WebhostingUK. I was determined to be clever, being a professional web developer, and decided to merge a load of old domains onto one master domain and host my blog there, so now you’ll find that www.minipix.co.uk, www.chapternine.co.uk and www.giftlistcentral.co.uk all redirect to www.matthewdawkins.co.uk. Seamlessly. Well, almost seamlessly. The trouble was, despite all my cleverness, I forgot to download all the images on my blog before cancelling the old hosting. Foolish fool.
So while everything worked, it looked rather bare. For the most part it wasn’t a huge issue, but believe it or not there are actually some blog posts that Google quite likes, such as my demonstration of OpenTTD junctions, which is somewhat underwhelming without the images.
Thankfully, the folks at PearTreeUK have their heads screwed on. I emailed them on the off-chance that they might have my old data lying around somewhere, half hoping that they didn’t (because that would be careless and unprofessional). The reply came back positive, and thankfully it’s not unprofessional at all – they actually have a policy in place to hang onto expired accounts’ backups for several months before automatically deleting them. Which is a very wise policy. And it meant that they were able to provide me with a full backup of my blog, including images. So I downloaded the images, put them in the right place, fiddled with my .htaccess file to make sure I didn’t get any straggling 404s, and hey-presto my images are back! Feel free to take a wander through my archives if you like, to marvel at my newly-found old images.
As an extra bonus, I’m pleased to say that something else fairly significant was also recovered at the same time. I had been writing a pregnancy diary during 2009, before Samuel’s birth, and I’d put it online (though hidden from public eyes) so that I could update it from wherever I happened to be. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, I kind of forgot it was there, so when I came to migrate all my websites from the old web host I completely forgot to take a backup of that diary. Thankfully, the backup PearTree were able to send me included all that hard work. One day I’ll finish off the last few weeks worth of entries (which are currently only in note form) and maybe make it public. Might make an interesting read. Maybe.
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