iCountry Media

One of the sites I own/manage crashed earlier this summer. It had some help, mostly from me. I learned a few lessons from the experience: 1) Never play around with MySQL after you've had a couple of beers and some allergy medicine, 2) Always back up your database before you begin any database modifications, and 3) backup your content every time you upload. I also learned how to recover content. Using a couple of search engines, Google and Bing, along with a free service called Copyscape. The first thing I did was search for cached content on the search engines. Search engines crawl the Internet constantly, taking snapshots of content. Somewhere out there in cyberspace, there are copies of everything ever posted. You just have to look for them. To do this, try entering one (or all) of the following into the search bar in on Google or Bing:

• cache: yoursite.com
• cache: keyword + yoursite.com
• cache: title of article or blog

To my surprise, I was able to recover more content from Bing than from Google. In fact, Google only fed me back about 10% of my lost content, the rest come from Bing which is why I use Bing now instead of Google. Bing just does a better job of finding what I'm looking for. I was also surprised to find how many of my articles had been lifted in their entirety and posted on other sites without credit. Copyscape helped with that. Yes, I was able to recover content because of these intellectual property theives, but it doesn't make it right. If you're using someone else's material, at the very least give them credit and provide a link back to the original site.