Last year I fucked up.
There’s really no other way to put it, I made the rookie mistake of not backing up everything before I started executing commands that could have some really bad consequences. I’d like to say it was hubris, thinking that my many years in the industry had made me immune to things like this, but in reality it was just my lack of knowledge of how certain commands worked. Thankfully it wasn’t a dreaded full wipe and I was able to restore the essence of this blog (I.E. the writing) without too much trouble, however over time it became apparent just how incomplete that restore was. Whilst I was able to restore quite a lot of the pictures I’ve used over the years I was still lacking lots of them, some of them on some of my favourite posts.
Thankfully, after writing some rather complicated PowerShell scripts, I was able to bulk restore a lot of images. Mostly this was because of the way I do the screenshots for my reviews, meaning there was a copy of pretty much everything on PC, I just had to find them. I’ve been reviewing games for quite some time though and that’s meant I’ve changed PCs a couple times, meaning some of the images are lost in the sea of old hard drives I have lying around the place. Whilst I was able to scrounge up a good chunk of them by finding an old version of the server I used to host locally there were still some images that eluded me, forcing me to think of other places that might have a copy of them.
My site has been on the Wayback Machine for some time now so I figured that there would (hopefully) be a copy of most of my images on there. For the most part there is, even the full sized ones, however there were still multiple images that weren’t there either. My last bastion of hope was Google’s cache of my website however they only store (or at least, make available) the latest version that they have indexed. Sometimes this meant that I could find an image here or there, as they seem to be archived separately and aren’t deleted if you remove it, however it was still at hit or miss affair. In the end I managed to get the list of missing images down from about 2000 to 150 and thanks to a fortuitous hard drive backup I found most of those will hopefully be eliminated in short order.
What kept me going throughout most of this was the mantra that many privacy advocates and parents alike have parroted many times: the Internet never forgets. For the most part I’d be inclined to agree with this as the vast majority of the information that I had put out there, even though I had erased the source, was still available for anyone to view. However the memory of the Internet, much like that of the humans that run it, isn’t a perfect one, routinely forgetting things, jumbling them up or just plain not remembering them at all. The traces of what you’re searching for are likely there somewhere, but there’s no guarantee that the Internet will remember everything for you.
