Apology for lost posts (now restored)

Post Reply
User avatar
Dave Keenan
Site Admin
Posts: 2180
Joined: Tue Sep 01, 2015 2:59 pm
Location: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Contact:

Apology for lost posts (now restored)

Post by Dave Keenan »

My humble apologies, but the server that holds the Sagittal forum, has been restored from yesterdays backup. I know that many posts have been lost.

@Ash9903b4, @cmloegcmluin and anyone else whose recent posts are now missing, Please consider using a cache-viewer utility, to recover text from your browser cache and repost it. I know there was some really valuable stuff in those posts. I will do the same. But there were many that I had not even got to read yet, and only know of their existence from email notifications.

If you're using Windows, whatever browser you used for posting, leave it alone and use another one to download and run whichever of these matches the browser you used for posting:
I'm using https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_cache_viewer.html for Firefox.
There is also https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cache_view.html for Chrome.
There are cache viewers for Macs too.

Rescue your own first. You may be the only person who has it cached. But if possible, rescue other people's too, and post them as quotes.

I share a VPS with my friend Eddie. He offers the following apology.
Eddie wrote:My apology to you and the others.

I not only rebooted but restored from yesterdays backup.

From where I was the server was dead since sometime yesterday.
No email, no webpages not SSH.

I didn't realize how active you were.

I won't do it again without checking by something other than email.

I was really worried we'd been hacked or a bad upgrade had done something and it would happen again.

It is a mystery why I was seeing the server as dead - I had internet and all the other sites were working normally.

So sorry.
Eddie
User avatar
Dave Keenan
Site Admin
Posts: 2180
Joined: Tue Sep 01, 2015 2:59 pm
Location: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Contact:

Re: Apology for lost posts

Post by Dave Keenan »

Many posts have now been restored, thanks to Nir Sofer's brilliant Cache Viewer utilities. The rest should be restored soon.
User avatar
cmloegcmluin
Site Admin
Posts: 1700
Joined: Tue Feb 11, 2020 3:10 pm
Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Real Name: Douglas Blumeyer (he/him/his)
Contact:

Re: Apology for lost posts

Post by cmloegcmluin »

Thanks Dave for doing so much restoration work. And thanks to Nir Sofer for his handy ChromeCacheView tool. When I found my browser's cache folder (on my PC running Windows 10, it was in C:\Users\DouglasBlumeyer\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache), it was full of files without extensions named "f_{6-digit hexadecimal}" of variable size. I didn't understand what this was, but the very first thing I did was copy the contents of this folder elsewhere where Chrome wouldn't touch it anymore and potentially wipe out something important.

What ChromeCacheView did was parse these files into the JavaScript, image, HTML, etc. files they constituted.

For future reference (hopefully we don't need to refer to it, but just in case), what worked for me best was:
  1. Selecting all parsed files and copying them out somewhere else, again, just in case.
  2. After extracting the files, I found ChromeCacheView's search was not super effective. But in my terminal, I knew I could use the command line tool grep to search for uniquely identifying sequences of words I remembered typing which I knew were among the last words I ever composed of each post, so that could get the most recent preview of it I had generated. For example:

    Code: Select all

    grep -rli "made a casual suggestion" .
    Where -r goes into recursive mode (paired with the final full stop makes it search every file in the directory), -i makes it case insensitive, and -l makes it return only the file names which contain this text, and only one match per file.
  3. I could then command-click on the results. The golden ones were of the format:

    Code: Select all

    ./mode=quote&f=17&t=475&p=1515~2.html
    Ones beginning with "./mode=post" and "./mode=edit" were gold too. These are the caches which include the form data of your post before submitting, including all of the BBCode and links etc. so you don't even have to reformat or go hunting again for stuff. Another little tip: if you see a bunch that look about the same but one ends with "~2" (as this example above" and one ends with "~1", then "~2" is the more recent version.
Thanks again @Dave Keenan, and please thank Eddie for his apology and let him know: no hard feelings.
Post Reply