Embarrassment Restored
I recovered a decade-old MySQL database from a hard-drive image's free space with an AI agent, restoring my entire blog's embarrassing past.
I have been blogging for decades, and except for the very initial phase when I was on blogspot, I've self-hosted my blog. This has resulted in my being subject to all the problems that self-hosters have: security issues, backups, and the need to hold onto one's own data.
Now, some 8 years or so ago, I was hosting everything on a Hetzner[1] server that had some >10 years of uptime and consequently had exactly zero security patches on a 10+ year kernel. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that the VPS I had with them was running on a physical server that was being retired and the VPS SKU itself was also being retired. Consequently, I had to switch to an alternative server. I did the normal thing and backed things up and planned to restore them soon. Then I moved to London, moved back to San Francisco, then Austin, then back again and forgot about these things.
About a year ago, I pulled out the old hard drives, dd'd them into images and wiped the drives and moved on. Recently, with AI agents getting very capable, I decided to try restoring the blogs before I anticipated being too busy to do so. While doing so, I discovered that in the hurry that I was, I hadn't actually backed up everything. I'd backed up all but the blog at arjie.com itself. Tragic!
Well, with the agent at my right hand, I found that I had. I had backed up the main blog, restored it to MySQL, and then just lost the backup. But the drive image had the old deleted MySQL database in its filesystem free space where it had not yet been overwritten. Opus 5.5 found the whole thing far too reverse-engineery for its taste, but Opus 4.8 was a willing lieutenant. What is outrageous to me is that I did all of this while waiting at Barry's Bootcamp for my friend Armaan[2].
The conversion has been remarkable. It doesn't carry the Wordpress theme or anything like that, but the original Wordpress installations were all exploited by one of those self-replicating worms which we are now fully inoculated against through the virtue of a static site[3]. The unfortunate upshot of the whole thing is that I now have restored all the embarrassing writing of my past[4].
Notes
[edit | edit source]- ↑ Everyone loves them for cheap hosting (though they are now subject to as many RAM issues as everyone else), but they have onerous KYC requirements. I had to scan my passport so that they'd take my money.
- ↑ I use an agent muxer which I wrote called Convoke. Like all personal software it is incredibly idiosyncratic and while I designed most of the interface myself (landing on something very similar to other muxers - none of which I've seriously used prior) I have no compunctions about wholesale plagiarism from other software.
- ↑ Once upon a time, a worry human engineers used to have is how proprietary formats or database-stored structures would last into the future. I had some hope that future software would restore things, which is why I held the faithful drive images, but I could never have imagined that a future machine intelligence could read through it and get such high fidelity output.
- ↑ This includes a great foreshadowing of my Motorcycle Accident where I allege that all two-wheelers are idiots. Well, they are not. But it turns out that I was!