my website is - GONE!

[Dave Amorde]

During the process of a forced "upgrade" by my Internet Service Provider, the entire contents of my SWPSkating.com website was destroyed. Their backups, which supposedly are done on a rotating daily/weekly/monthly basis, are non-existent. I can't count the hundreds of hours I've spent editing photos, creating pages, etc. over the years to make that site, but I am so absolutely furious I can barely stand myself.
To top it off, the reason why this upgrade got started is that I was preparing to upload a series from the last SWP Regionals in Escondido. Since it would possibly be my last update, I had created a series featuring every skater who participated - a "magnum opus".
I am hoping to re-create the site on some level soon, but the simple fact is that many of the older images were scanned from film; the others may or may not exist in my countless archives that I have in storage at home and in a storage facility. I doubt I'll be able to set aside the time to begin from scratch. Even if I find the photos, the process of preparing them for web display and creating the pages themselves is just too time consuming.
My deepest apologies to all the athletes, their friends, parents, and other family members. I feel like I built a mansion from the ground up with my own two hands, only to watch it burn to the ground.

Oh yea, a piece of advice: don't use Yahoo webhosting.

[Arsenette]

Dave - I just logged in after a long while and I'm truly sorry to see that beaufiful site dissapear I hope you can somehow come back and redo the site. I know it's a ridiculously time consuming effort. My only suggestion is to do what I do and do everything offsite in your computer then upload it to the host. I've lost things before in a previous site I had and I swore to never do that again. Even if I lost my hosting I still have my site safely in my hardrive. Again I'm really sorry for this to have happened and I hope to someday see it again bigger and better than before

[AquaSkate]

I occasionally visit this board (my son skates out of CP), I have to sign up after reading you post and waited about an hour to finally be able to login...LOL. OK, here's the archive of your past webpages http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://SWPSkating.com. Hope you could retrieve some of your lost work. Good luck!

[Sylvia]

Thanks for posting, AquaSkate, FYI, the following quotes were posted by Dave on the Skatefans mailing list in Feb. 2008 in response to people who also informed him about the archived version(s) of his site on the web:

My site is cached in several locations, but note that background
images, photos, and CSS styles are all gone.
As for keeping my own backups: the web plan I signed up for 10 years
ago didn't offer traditional FTP page/file transfers that would
facilitate such backups. The site database driven, similar to modern
ASP.NET sites, and I had no access to that database. The only
administration option was a web-based tool.
Ironically, this whole fiasco was triggered by an attempt to move
my account to a "standard" webhosting account that allow traditional
FTP updating, and thus permit me to make a real backup.
In any case, I do have most of the photos, it's all of the HTML
that is a PITA to recreate.

Unfortunately, my site was database driven, and there was
little true HTML rendered. The photos were in one location, the
thumbnails in another, the stylesheets still another, and the
actual "pages" were nothing more than indexes into the database
tables. It wasn't backup friendly, but then again, just like
other "home owners" (to borrow an analogy), I did have fire
insurance - doesn't mean a damn thing though, if the insurance
company refuses to pay! I suspect that I'll see my ISP in court.
I know I should have moved the site earier to a traditional full
HTML, directory tree structure that could be backed up via FTP.
Ironically, that's exactly what was in progress when the site was
lost. The conversion process burped. Oops.

Dave

I will be moving this thread to the Archived Threads section of the board in the near future. Best Wishes to Dave as he rebuilds his site!

[Charlenefiguresk8r]

That is aweful. I hope you still continue to post photos in the future even if you are not able to post the photos from the past competitions. That is truly frustrating. I love your site and all you do for the skaters and their fans.

Thanks again and good luck.