image credit: point_cat35 [Flickr]
A few years ago, a technically minded (geeky? Who said geeky?) friend offered to set me up with a blog on his personal server. Having kept journals in various forms over the years, I thought, Why not? And hey, good work research.
With nothing in particular I wanted to write about, over the next four years it became a compendium of family and work life anecdotes, not very deep thoughts, links and anything else that came to mind. Few people knew about it, but I was vaguely aware that with very specific searches (eg the name of my band) it would show up on Google, so I was careful not to include client names or even where I worked, just to stay under the radar.
Then two days ago I got a frantic email from my friend (with a subject line that I’m amazed got through my spam filter) saying that while updating the blog software, he’d accidentally wiped away all four and a half years of posts — about 250 or so. Poof! And he had no backup of his server. Suddenly my lighthearted musings of the last while became more valuable — there were a lot of nice memories recorded in there that (as every parent knows) don’t last on their own. What to do?
Google to the rescue! Knowing that my band name showed up in searches, I started there. Sure enough, it came up, but of course the link itself was useless. On the other hand, the “cache” link… worked like a charm. And best of all, each post noted the name of the post before and after, so with a search string that went something like: “site:www.theservername.net elliottblog blog toronto ” I found I could methodically work my way through the posts and extract all the content from them into a text file.
Google as file backup! It was laborious (and Google had lost track of a few of them), but hey, posts with names like “Glove in a Cold Climate” are worth saving. Ahem.
There is much written about the worrisome way that Google is crawling and documenting our online activities, but this is the first time I’ve really considered it as something with personal benefit beyond getting a decent search result. For once, the idea that Google has been following along behind me like an obsessive court reporter, recording and storing my meanderings, is oddly comforting.
Not that I won’t be backing up my own posts from now on.
Elliott Smith