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Comment by FerretFred | Hacker News Reader

It's well worth doing, especially if you have an important series of events to chronicle. I started my original blog in the late 90s: I wrote the software myself (probably badly) and based it on PHP and MySQL: I thought other bloggers at the time did that as well.. maybe they didn't :) Anyway, I chronicled the first 5 years of my new family growing up, complete with pictures, and diligently backed up the precious database on a regular basis, to CD. Then, after moving house a couple of times I realised that I'd physically lost the F**** backup, and my blog was lost forever. I never quite got over that. Nowadays it wouldn't be a problem with multiple backups to Cloud etc. If you're going to start a blog on any platform, make sure you back it up!

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yeah! I actually tried the Wayback Machine/Archive, and sure enough my blog is there. However, I designed it to just have (say) 5 lines of content under the header, then the reader would clock on "More" to read the whole article. This is because the blog was originally designed to be accessed on a WAP-capable phone (https://youtu.be/Da8_4NqxLM8?t=18). Sadly, in my case this meant running a database query and of course the Archive doesn't support that as there's no database :/ I just need a couple of days to have another look for that CD ...

I feel a particular mix of disappointment and loss(?) every time I encounter an interesting link on a long-dead site only to find that the target, never saved, is lost to time. And the same for pages with crucial, unsaved images. Better the proverbial ignorance, I guess.

Though, have you looked at the Wayback Machine Site Map and URLs views for your blog? On the off chance that the Alexa crawler could already extract URLs from JavaScript back then, there's a possibility that additional requests were captured that can't be played back in the Wayback Machine. (This all assuming the site was served over HTTP to the crawler--otherwise it would have only gotten an 'unsupported' page, right?)

I tried, and failed. I shall know for next time :(

The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL. This page is not available on the web because of server error Click here to search for all archived pages

Can you find it on the internet archive? https://archive.org/

I second this suggestion - definitely worth trying. My own frivolous homepage on a Demon Internet subdomain was archived in '96 and it wasn't exactly page of the day so there's a good chance your stuff was captured. Incidentally, I believe that if you have a current robots.txt on the current domain (not the archived) in question that disallows access to the pages then although they're archived they won't show in waybackmachine's archive. You can enable access to them by allowing them in the (current) robots.txt and they should show up again. Presumably you'd have to wait for waybackmachine to re-crawl your robots.txt

Worth a shot?

How about the wayback machine?

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