Website recovery question

Lucascraft

Wasn't really sure where to put this, but the technology forum seems like as good a place as any. Sorry if this is in the wrong spot.

Here's the short version of the story: Last year, my friend and I put together a website for a game we were really into at the time. The site was intended to be a game resource and had a lot of data, tips, spoilers, and general information. After about 6 months, we lost interest in the game and decided to not renew our web hosting, so the site was inevitably shut down. I did all of the photoshop and artistic stuff for the website, and he did the coding. Well, my friend decided to reformat his computer, and all our work was lost.

Here's my question: If we reactivate our account with Hostgator, would we be able to recover our site files? Does anyone have any experience with this?

I've got most of the art stored on my computer, but all the web code was deleted in the reformat. I'm not really interested in resurrecting the website, so much as I'm interested in recovering the code for future knowledge.

It was a fun project, and he and I both learned a lot about web design while doing it. If we ever decide to make another website in the future, I'd like to be able to mimic some of the thing we did. I'm pretty sure we still own the domain name. We bought it for a full year. But our web hosting was through Hostgator and that was on a monthly bill.

Does anyone know how long they keep files before deleting them? I'd really like to recover our stuff from them if possible, even if it means shilling out 10 bucks to reactivate the site for a month.

Infidel

Send an email to their support?

Lucascraft

Ahhh hahahah. The plot thickens. I forgot about this little hiccup. We were also running our guild's website for WoW from the same Hostgator account. Well, we left that guild and turned over the website to someone else, who has changed the account info and password. So basically I think we're just fucked.

Let this be a lesson to all you amateur web designers out there: Don't store your only copy of the web-code on someone's computer who likes to reformat every 6 months.

Woot427

Being a shared hosting solution with hundreds of thousands of sites, I doubt Hostgator still has the files but its at least worth an email.

What kind of "coding" are we talking about here? Straight, static HTML? Something dynamic such as PHP? If it's straight html that you're looking at recovering, I would try seeing if Archive.org's Waybackmachine has any cached copies of the site. (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) They often archive image files as well.

If you let me know what the domain is, I can take a look around and see if I can find a cached version somewhere.

Infidel

Good call, I was thinking of code as script and not the HTML. If you're wanting to recover the layout and such mainly and can recode any backend if needed, then hitting up the archive sites is a great idea.

As for backups, make them. 8-) I have copies of my sites regularly backed up to my local computer, and every few months typically I make a DVD backup of it as well. Code, images, databases, all of it.

Lucascraft

That's a good idea. I'll check it out. I think most of it was PHP. We used a premade template and heavily modified it with our own artwork and color scheme. We also used a forum template and heavily modified it. And I mean heavily. I made somewhere around 50 unique buttons for the forum in photoshop.

The site itself had a lot of tables, and art from the game itself. The site was called disgaeasource.com and was a Disgaea 3 site.

Oh, and there is one note of good news: I still have admin access to my old guild's website. We had a few test pages for our disgaeasource website on my guild page. They were hidden so the public couldn't find them, but we knew the URLs so we were able to test stuff for one site using the other site. I scavanged as much as I could from the WoW guild site.

Edit: And one other note of good news - My friend has a second PC that I sometimes use when I'm hanging out at his apartment. Many of the art resources are on his second PC. I think the bulk of what we lost is all the tables we had for weapon stats, unit stats, move stats, and every other kind of stats the game had. We were a really comprehensive site.

Lucascraft

I checked that archive.org site. No luck there. But cached files did give me an idea. What if I were to boot up an old PC that I have here at my place that I used a couple times to test the site with a different resolution and monitor size? Would there be a chance that any of the files would be cached on that machine simply from visiting the site a time or two?

exoplasm

Lucascraft wrote: »

I checked that archive.org site. No luck there. But cached files did give me an idea. What if I were to boot up an old PC that I have here at my place that I used a couple times to test the site with a different resolution and monitor size? Would there be a chance that any of the files would be cached on that machine simply from visiting the site a time or two?

Not likely that anything usable would be on there... Maybe a few images or HTML output pages, if the cache is even still around.