Wiped Out, and Recovery

Quick daily entry for 3/3/2011:

Warrick is a super-handy tool for recovering a website (or fragments thereof) if you've had failure of a disk, server, or credit card. It attempts to do this by pulling recoverable bits from the Wayback Machine at web-archive.org, as well as from Google, Bing, and Yahoo's caches, then assembling them into a flattened copy of the original website.

Depending on compute-cycles being available, the inventor of Warrick sometimes runs it as a service (currently not accepting new requests), but I've downloaded and installed the software on my own computers. It's written in Perl, and requires a few non-exotic modules, but is otherwise pretty simple to install.

I wish I'd had this a years ago. I've basically performed it's tricks, by hand, several times for friends, customers, co-workers and family who've deleted something on a website they wish they hadn't, or wanted to recover something from a domain name that they suddenly didn't own.

Speaking of things that've been wiped out, my cat Brutus and I are exhausted, so we'll leave tonight's Forced March blog entry here, post a quick cat-photo, and head to bed.