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Google is Good, Hackers are Bad

Had a bit of a panic today, when I was attempting to administer my blog away from home. The network I was on did not allow me the luxury of connecting to my hosting admin panel because of closed ports, and phpMyAdmin fails to work because of a new security 'feature' of my hosting that works against the network I was on. Needless to say, the process of updating and adding new entries is long and arduous, and involves a lot of manual code written in PHP. This is not ideal, so I generally wait until I'm at home to manage.

For whatever reason, I'd decided not to bother waiting, and tried to manually edit the site. At this point, I noticed that all of my blog entries had disappeared from the site. Panic set in a little at this point, as I realised my backups were less than recent.

A harsh lesson learnt, I went about trying to figure out how it had happened, which was when I noticed, through the visitor tracking system I'd built, that the blog had had a lot of activity in the area that allows users to post replies. I've not had one reply in the past 2 years, so a sudden burst of activity struck me as a little odd and, coupled with recent events, suspicious. The crux of the problem was some out-dated code, which I'd written a couple of years ago, and never actually reviewed since, and I'd foolishly believed that the validation code I was using was infallible. Turns out I was very wrong!

Having now done what I could, I got home and set about fixing the lost blog entries, only to discover to my dismay that the backup which I thought I'd had was not. I could see no clear way of getting back any of the entries until my flatmate asked if I'd checked Googles cached pages. This was a stroke of genius, and call Google what you will, I'm an even bigger fan for saving my bacon. It had cached all of my blog entries, preserving all the HTML code within them. Manually restoring them did take a bit of time, but at the cost of retrieving what was lost, I counted it a fair bargain. So, I, for one, am extremely glad that Google had cached my site, and for me, their strapline certainly holds true: Google is not evil.