It was 11 PM on a Tuesday night when I broke the Golden Freelancer Rule: I decided I would check my email one last time before going to bed...
A few weeks earlier I had finished a large migration of all my web design and hosting clients to a new server. As far as I was concerned my clients were happy with a faster server and a better spam filter. It had all gone better than I had expected. Or so I thought.
When I opened my mailbox I was immediately greeted by the subject line: "All images gone". I went to my client's site (a small publishing house) and indeed: every image returned a 404. And then it struck me: did I forget to copy the client's images to the new server?
I first went back to the old server to see if there was still a backup available, but the previous server only retained backups for 2 weeks. No luck. I started breaking out in a sweat, and I realized it was going to be a long night.
After going through a few options I realized there was only one way not to lose my client — or my self-esteem: I had to get my hands dirty and dive deep into the Wayback Machine. I made a soup to gather some courage.
I quickly saw that even on the Wayback Machine some images were missing. I created a script to automatically download any images that were still there and started running it. Simultaneously I started frantically downloading any image I saw by hand. Just in case the cache suddenly expired before my script had finished.
Even though the script did a great job grabbing what was left, it wasn't good enough. There were still images missing. AI also couldn't find more elsewhere on the web. Then I decided I would search for the book titles myself, and manually crop and improve whatever low-res images I could find. But I could only find 4 more missing images. I needed 74.
It was 2 AM and I decided to be honest with the client: "I made a mistake, tried to fix it, but I hope you still have the missing book covers. You can also mail them to me, and I will put them back online for you. If you want me to reimburse your hosting costs, I understand".
While I was typing the email it struck me: didn't I also back up the whole server to an external drive? I closed the 'compose email' window, went through the drawers, plugged the drive in and there it was: a small folder called 'imgs'.