How Spiders (and Blogger) Saved My Blog

I deleted my blog about a week ago. I'd like to say it was an experiment, but it wasn't. The incident occurred in an attempt to delete a group blog that had fallen into disuse. After a day of panicking and then emailing Blogger and my digital history professor, I calmed down. I discovered (with help and advice from a special someone) that I could recover my deleted posts by searching their titles on Google.

Instead of clicking on the title of my blog post, I clicked on Cached. This turned up Google's cache, or archive, of my blog. I then copied and pasted the text and pictures into my new/old blog (After deleting my blog, I immediately reserved the same domain name and title by re-registering for a blog on Blogger). I was delighted, and even more so when I realized my links remained active.

I couldn't help but think of how my experience tied into my previous blogs about Internet archiving and Facebook. If I delete my blog again, by accident or otherwise, my posts and ideas have been archived by Google's life-saving spiders and are available for anyone to access. I can't help but think of the amount of resources this might provide future researchers or historians.

But I don't need to repeat my previous posts, you can read them for yourself now that I have successfully restored them. I am thankful I was able to recover my blog and I have Google's creepy, crawly spiders to thank for taking snapshots of my blog and archiving it before it was deleted.

P.S. After posting this entry I promptly received an email from a helpful Blogger employee informing me that they had restored my old blog. Moral of the story? There is a lot of archiving and caching going on and, as a result, no blog need ever be lost again!