On Monday I just did a back up and was getting ready to download it and then move to new host, when my site went down. After trying to contact my host to find out where my site was, I received this email.
The main hard drive has failed and I'm getting errors on the second hard drive also.

Every day I would ask where my site is and host would say still doing backups blah, blah, blah. On Thursday the site was back up, or I should say there was a theme there, but none of my content was on it. So I emailed host and he said It took a hell of a lot longer to restore everything than I thought. I got joomla back up on your site but you need to log in and set the template to the one you were using. You had to many backups in your root folder which only left your account with 50 MB of free disk space. So when I did the restore your account went over it's limit and caused a crap load of errors on your site. It also corrupted about 8 of your joomla php pages which I restored already but I don't have admin access to your joomla backend.


Now I am not very experienced or knowledgable in a lot of technical things, and relying on my host to fix this it will never happen, And can it be fixed? Last month when this host tried to move the site to a new server he messed it up and wouldn't answer my emails or calls as to where the site was. I finally had to have a friend email with a bogus hosting question and she was answered in 5 minutes. She then said why she was emailing and then he finally told me about the moving screw up. Thankfully he still had a copy of the site on the old server, but this is just one of the reasons I was moving when this happened.

This is a community nonprofit website that I have put so much time and money into that I have sorely neglected my own job and depleted by savings. Can someone help?

So was he able to restore your website from their backups in it's entirety, or do you just have bits and pieces of your website back up?

katers this sounds like your web host isn't doing a good job. Things do happen, but the backup should have been able to restore everything other than any changes you might have made since the last backup.

Also there's never a reason for a web host to write an email blaming you when something goes wrong with their server.

I think you're making a good call looking for another host.

That doesn't help you get the site back though. If you didn't already have a backup then you probably do have to rely on your host to get things back as much as possible, but there are some things you can try.

Try the Internet Archive. Towards the top there's a search box for the Wayback Machine. If your site has been online a few years it's possible they have some of the older pages. Unfortunately they won't have newer pages and they may not have the pages you're missing, but you might find some content that's possibly lost.

Another place to check is Google. Search for info:www.yourdomain.com/filename

That's the full URL of one of your missing pages. As long as Google has indexed that page they will show a result and some links below. One will be a link to the cache of the page which should show you what the page looked like the last time Google indexed it. Grab the page fast, because if Google comes back again and sees something different at that URL the cache may change.

One more idea is to check your own computer. If you had visited the site, especially the missing pages recently they might still be in your temporary files folder on your computer. I once accidentally deleted a file I was working on and found a copy in the temporary folder which saved me from having to recode the entire page.

Hopefully your host will get the entire site back up for you since these other ideas aren't guaranteed to work.

In the future make sure to regularly back up your files. I like to keep a copy of all the sites I work on on my own computer as well as on some backup drives I have. At the very least make sure you keep a copy of what's on the server on your computer.