PSA: My whole stash of early 2000s forum avatars got wiped in a server cleanup

I used to host a personal site with all my favorite icons from old message boards. The free hosting service I used did a MAJOR purge without warning last month, and my backup was on an old USB stick that failed. Has anyone managed to recover files from a corrupted stick like that? I'm desperate to get those pieces of internet culture back.

3 comments

3 Comments

evanpalmer2d ago

Man that sucks, losing a piece of history like that. Reminds me of the time I accidentally formatted a hard drive with all my old fanfiction drafts from like 2006. There's something uniquely painful about losing those dumb little pieces of your past life online, lmao. I never did get those back, just had to live with the shame of my cringe being gone forever.

faithellis2d ago

For future reference @evanpalmer, try Recuva next time, it works on hard drives too.

val_cooper391d ago

Ugh, that sinking feeling is the worst. I had a similar scare with a drive full of my old band's rehearsal recordings (so much cringe, but also weirdly precious). I freaked out and tried a free program called TestDisk first, which actually saw the files even though Windows said the drive was empty. It was a slog, but I recovered most of it folder by folder. Just having that little bit of hope from seeing the file names again was a lifesaver.