Back in March a deploy ran rsync --delete against bandsthatjam.com and wiped the uploaded images folder off production. Those images only existed on the server.

This week I went looking for a backup to restore from. There isn't one. Nothing on the Synology, nothing in Google Drive. The hosting backups lived on the old VPS, which was decommissioned a week after the delete.

What survived was luck. A migration scrape ran one to two days before the deletion and captured 852 images. Those 852 are every image the site has now.

389 of 625 posts were running on a stock crowd silhouette. Going through them, 90 already named an image in their own body text that had been sitting in the repo since that scrape, never wired up as the featured image. Rewiring those dropped the placeholder count to 299. I also pulled the stock photo's credit line off those 90, since leaving it would have credited the stock photographer for a photo they didn't take.

The other 3,525 images the posts name are gone for good. Those need new photography or nothing.

The BTJ deploy script is additive now, with no --delete, and production gets a snapshot before every deploy.