h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Any announcements on what has just happened? Did h2g2 get restored from a backup taken on the evening of 24 April 2021? Will there be subsequent restores to bring us closer to real time? Or is that it?

G

Hi Gnomon

Thanks for your message, and sorry for the delay in replying. We took the proverbial long lunch break to recover from the shock of the cyber incident that affected many websites including h2g2. As I understand things, you're right about the backup. There is a possibility that more data could be recovered, but we have been advised that it can be restored as new content rather than overwriting anything else, so we're OK to create new Entries, etc. We have now started the process of reinstating Edited Entries from that period as far as we can.

Hope this helps - SashaQ

Thanks Sasha. That helps a lot.

I haven't been on the site much in the last few years but I still submitted two entries into the Guide and it would be a pity to lose them.

If I e-mailed images to the artists two years ago, I presume they won't still have them, so I'll have to send them again.

Is the artists e-mail account working again, or do I need to send the images through other means?

Thanks Gnomon

The Artists e-mail account is still not working, but images have all been saved in Trello, so that's no problem.

Yes, Bluebottle should be able to restore Minecraft for you, and I should be able to restore Napier's Bones for you May take a little while, but we'll do our best

I just realised that the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org takes fairly regular backups of the h2g2.com front page and anything linked from it to a few levels deep, so any Edited Entry published in the last few years is backed up there


Unfortunately, it is html format and it is quite a chore to convert it back into Guide ML. Still might be worth it for entries we have no other copy of.

[SQ] Ooo - I did look in the Wayback Machine and couldn't find anything myself - can you give some links I found 'find and replace' worked quite well for converting html - would be worth it indeed if there's something in there that we haven't already been able to rescue (we have recovered over 100 Entries, but there are still about 35 unaccounted for).

Bluebottle has given me the link to the wayback machine calendar and it is working! Thank you so much

Thank you again - I've even managed to recover the text of my Entries that were in Peer Review when the Ransomnesia happened