well, jack, i feel your pain. being on blog 4, or is it 5 now. Just start over and keep plugging away at it.

My sympathies, Jack. But while they can destroy the archives, they can't kill ideas - and that's the most valuable asset that was untouched.

And there's hope -- I've downloaded a bunch of Google caches that should, in theory, save my writing. But some images may be gone, and worst of all, I'm afraid the comments on old posts may be too much to try to save.

You've already had the Google cache idea.
Also, get yourself to
http://www.archive.org/index.php and enter "bojack.org." They've got a pretty good collection of your old writings from 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2005.

Bummer!

Note also that you can do an advance Google search for only pages matching bojack.org
The cached page results come with the comments attached at the bottom, current as of the time of the caching.

Love the new look.

We're with you.

The host must surely have a nightly backup process automated. They just need a little incentive to dig up one database (visually little more than a directory with filenames matching table names).

Check http://www.samspade.org/ to see which server farm your reseller host has contracted with, for they may control the backup scheme, as part of their package.

go here
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/
and search on webhostplus to find something like this.

(Immediate term action:) Within the CPanel interface look for the *backup* icon. Then select the MySQL database to backup -- which would download it to the computer you are using to access the site. (It is just a few clicks.)

Forget the google cache route, if it can't be automated then call it all a draft. The database is the key to automated recovery -- minus pictures.

"The Company." Heh.

Jack: Glad to see you back up and running, and so soon. We cannot even imagine what it would take to marshal the energy to recreate a site on such short notice, while grieving the very possible loss of everything that has come before. On a smaller scale, it evokes the efforts of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper just one year ago today. Nice job, keep up the good work. Everyone is feeling your pain.

Imagine waking up to find that 217 years of your writing has been lost, probably irretrievably. That’s what the Company that has been hosting this country told me earlier last presidential term. My recent experiences with that Company warned me that something bad might happen, but I never stopped to consider that it might be this bad. They are claiming that they were hacked, but given my recent experiences with them, I can’t believe anything they say.

Heh.

Hey! LOVE the new look. [Believe it or not, the layout updated from one look to the other even as we were posting the comment above.]

The color palette is especially fetching. And familiar.

Sorry, Jack. All you have to do is post blogs about North Macadam, the Tram, Sten, Adams, corruption, PDC, Goose Hollow, Linnton, etc. and your blog will be full. Thanks for the commentary on all your blogs; they define the issues.

Do you think the PDC or Portland city council had anything to do with the hacking?

I'm really not sure it was a hacking at all. Until I see hard evidence, I'd say it is equally plausible that "the company" erased everything. And maybe not even by mistake.

Welcome back! I wonder why I couldn't pull you up from work this morning.

You're ever going to lack for new material. Not in this town.

I hope you can recover your archives: what's past is prologue. Not to mention all the future "I told you so's"...

I like these quotes from "The Companies" FAQ:

"We can also meet demands that ISPs can’t – such as high-speed access to your site, massive storage space, absolute reliability and rock-solid security for your data."

"We’ve developed an ultra-reliable infrastructure that takes advantage of the best load balancing, clustering and RAID technologies so you’ll never have to worry about your site going down or loosing data to a system failure. We also employee strict security measures to prevent your site from being compromised."

Mark Brunster(Torrid Joe) did it during work at the CoP

I'm glad you're back, Jack. I hope you're able to retrieve all of your old work.

Jack, you were missed, greatly. I hope you keep going with this blog despite the difficulties you've encountered.

I'll bet it was a member of the creative class!

Perhaps the Don's of the City of Portland could learn new tricks from the old webhost. Economic terrorism; if true, or scorched earth.

you are one of my first three hits every morning

So they don't have ANY backups of your site, to at least give you the raw data if not a functional blog?

even though you sold me out to Mult. Co election officials a few month's ago I forgive

I dont personaly make international calls but if i did I would expect them to be monitered for security reasons. When I am speaking on a blog such as this i expect my opinions to be anonamous and free of government scrutiny. That is not the case here My personal info was given to A local government agency by this website. Blogger beware

Given that Jack Bog's Blog is one of the Good Things about Portland and a reason for hope, I was worried, and am happy to see it back.

Good to see you're back. Sorry for the loss of the archives :(

First time caller long time listener - Jack, I was sorry to see the site down yesterday, but I am glad you are making it back. Keep up the good work, we youngsters need you to educate us on the rich and colorful goings-on of our humble little burg.

That sucks, Jack. For future reference (and this is totally not meant in the nanny-nanny-boo-boo way), MT may have some good backup plugins that would make it really easy to back up your database. I'm now running a site on WordPress, and it makes it super-easy. In fact, I will probably move my MT site to WP pretty soon, if I can get it figured out. But I suspect MT has the same thing.

I didn't know what to do with myself yesterday when I was unable to access you...not to akin you to a drug or anything... :)

I'm so sorry about the loss...you are prolific, intelligent, funny, and have a good heart...not to mention you married a girl from my very small home town. I hope that you are able to retrieve your archives.

you are one of my first three hits every morning

The others are acid and bong?

That's what I was thinking too, heh.

Have your lawyer call the company and demand they hand over your data on CD from backup. If they say they don't' have backups, call the tv stations and explain about their rock solid reliability at that company. Register thatcompanysucks.com ... you know, get creative. The jerks have your data more than likely, they just don't feel like winding the tape back for you.