From Anol at Soulsoup (which is now a 404!):
“mBlog, the free MT based blog hosting service where my SoulSoup was hosted discontinued their service without any notice! I don’t have any backup of my last 8 months of blogposts (more than 450 posts).
There is no way I can contact them – I mailed mBlog support – and that bounced.
SoulSoup along with many other blogs right now in deep soup.”
Ick, horrible, no notice and now the cheeky buggers say:
“A number of requests from our members have prompted us to offer a restoration service at a nominal fee.”
Which basically means that they’re holding your blog to ransom… bloody hell! If they’d given their users a few days notice they could at least have shifted their content.
Terrible stuff, the content should be made freely available to all bloggers who want to export it.
(I wonder to what degree MT are at fault here too, the notice on the mBlog homepage seems to indicate that they might be)
That’s really shitty, but it did happen with weblogs.com and I would say any free provider is at risk. My advice to all new bloggers is basically start out on a free service and if you like blogging and think you can maintain it long term then move to paid services. Either something like typepad or get your own internet space and use an open source platform such as wordpress, nucleus etc.
One of the readers of my weblog was an mBlog user. He sent me an e-mail recently asking if I had any copies of his postings in my aggregator – but sadly the only thing that I ever received from his RSS was the first sentance. I found that I could see a few of his postings if I used the Google Cache method (searching and then clicking on the ‘cached’ link). Now that I’ve set up MovableType on my page I wonder what would happen if they decided to close their doors. I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed and keep burning those backup CDs.
I would be PO-d too, but then again counting on a free hsoting service to always have your content, is well, a bit foolish. Any free (or even $) service can go belly up .I feel bad for the author who got his blog hosed, but without backups for any service, you are naked in a windstorm.
It is easy to say in hindsight, but one could have been reading the tea leaves as MT changed their pricing a few yards back, but there is not much you can tell from the mBlog statement.
I would also give the internet archive a shot as well http://web.archive.org/
It’s a tricky one isn’t it, but common courtesy says at least give them a bit of notice as to when it’s going to disappear. Apparently their export service is html based too so no MT export!
I know what you’re saying about free services, but I wonder how a lot of people would feel if bloger closed their doors!
That friend I spoke about earlier was actually able to recover a great deal of his postings from Google’s Cache. He recently reposted all of his work on to a new blogspot page – http://jessesjapan.blogspot.com/ – he did rather good. This might be a good method for other mBlog victims.
hey Im the guy john is talking about lol. Yeah to get your blog stuff search the name of your weblog in google and the name of the month (e.g. september) next to it. It will give you the september archives link and then you click the cache button and you can copy and paste. thank god for google it saved my life lol!