Update on Grace Notes - Monique found a site that (partly) backed up the original Blog

 I haven't addressed the whole "Grace Notes" situation since the first post on this blog.  That was 6 months ago.  At the time I wasn't sure if I had the heart to rebuild the old Grace Notes website, since everything I wrote had been lost.  Still had the music on Youtube, but re-writing a decade of blogging, doing all the historical research on the songs again, was a daunting thought.

Before giving up the Bluehost-managed site, I was certain I'd backed up the website.  All my other sites were backed up, and still available on my hard drive.  But this one disappeared.  Not sure if it was just my imagination, or if something happened to the file. but it was gone.  

Now, at the start of a new year, I've been dipping my toe into the water.  Writing a bit here and there, but not ready for a big re-start.  That's changed, thanks to Monique.  Last weekend was eventful.  If I write it up somewhere, I'll add a link.  But it's not pertinent to this page. 
     This page is about Monique's discovery of Grace Notes on the Wayback Machine.

It's not like we didn't know about Wayback.  I'd searched it last year shortly after realizing Grace Notes was lost.  But I went the wrong way.  Found my site archived there, but I'd looked at it from the most recent crawls, after the site was gone.  The results looked to me like the only thing archived was a "site no longer available" statement from Bluehost.  Massive depression.

This weekend Monique was trying to help me solve a different but related issue and discovered Wayback DID have my site archived, but you had to search further back into the past.  She started from the first crawl, in 2013 (Grace Notes was begun in 2011 or 2012, Wayback first crawled it in 2013).  Moving forward, she found the last full site crawl was in 2017.  So yes, there's still a lot missing, both from the beginning of the site, and from the end.  But it still gives me back nearly 5 years of blogs!!  That's something like 82 unique posts.  

That's life-changing.  It went from feeling impossible, to merely "very difficult".  From overwhelmed, to feeling positive.  

Since then, I've been saving each page, one by one, from the Wayback machine, to my a hard drive on my computer.  Wayback is extremely slow, but I don't care.  It saved my work, for which I'm very grateful.  Once all the pages are safely saved to disc, the restoration can begin.  Going to take a while. If I can back up 4 or 5 pages every evening, probably about a month.  Longer if I get sidetracked. But at least it's progress.

By The Way:  If you go so far as looking for my website on Wayback, bear in mind it's not a live rendition.  It's an archived image of Grace Notes.  It "looks" right, but none of the links are live, except for the ones that lead to other pages on the site.  The Youtube videos are still available, but are filtered through several links with very slow loading times, to get the actual live YouTube link. 
If you're interested in the music, just click here: We'll Understand it Better By and By  That'll get you to one of my songs, and you can branch out from there if it interests you.

It's one of my favorite songs, and if I'm going to send you to watch one of my videos, might as well put my best foot forward!