Quote:
Originally Posted by JCL
Good suggestion. I was thinking, though, that if the UK site owner has gone walkabout, and is the only legal contact with the hosting provider, then the volunteer admins may have no access to those backup tapes?
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The site owner is primarily responsible for maintaining a backup of the site code, flat files and the database, but most ISP's will provide backup services either as part of the hosting fee or as a service that you can pay for. So either the owner or ISP *might* have backups.
That being said, one of the mods or interested parties should call the isp, explain the situation and ask them nicely to hold a backup of the site for them until this situation can be worked out. There's no guarantee that the ISP has a backup, but unless the question is asked you'll never know the answer.
Regarding this entire situation, the godfather has poached and squatted on the domain name, plain and simple, and while he doesn't have an ethical problem with that, there are plenty of other people who deal with the internet as a business who still have a moral compass and wouldn't have done the same thing. Now this is assuming that the previous owner didn't intend to let the domain registration lapse. If it was an oversight, then the new owner should really return the domain to the original owner IMO. If the original owner intentionally let it expire without letting the mods and site membership know, for whatever reason he might have had, then the domain name is up for grabs, first come first served.