animalcare.my – Memories from the Past, too

Dear Friends,

If you remember, on 11th March, I wrote that I shall maintain this blog and continue to write, but I would be deleting all our aid posts from the past. So, I actually started doing that – sifting through thousands and thousands of previous posts since June 2009, making the difficult decision of which to keep and which to delete.

It turned out to be far more difficult than I had expected. There were so many memories, especially in the cases from our early years. I had a very personal interest and involvement in many of the cases, working closely with the rescuers and the vets, visiting the animals while they were at the clinic, helping them after discharge. Those memories were so very dear to me. Deleting the stories felt like deleting a part of my life. It was so difficult, but I did it anyway. Every post I deleted felt like ripping off a band-aid.

After a few days, I had ended up deleting more than 5000 posts from the past and some were already permanently deleted from the Trash – this meant that I would never be able to get them back. But a few cases remained deeply ingrained in my heart. For example, there was Chewie’s case – she was a small little kitten rescued by a group of young students from the roof and she had a serious case of diaphragmatic hernia. I visited Chewie every day at the clinic to cheer her on and give moral support to the students as it was their very first time doing any rescue work. Then, there was Blackey’s case, a sporo-cat who had come all the way from Kedah to Puchong, for her treatment. And so many more. I wanted to get back those stories, so I went to petfinder.my’s Wagazine as they had imported our stories from January 2010 to August 2024. I searched for those stories, republished them on this blog and backdated them. It was a crazy project because I had to copy them one by one and reinsert the images too.

I finally decided I shall not be deleting any posts from the past – it’s too painful to delete such an integral part of my life. But more than 2000 posts had already been permanently deleted from the Trash by then – how was I going to get them back? I consulted ChatGPT for options. I learnt that the host normally keeps scheduled backups! So I asked the host and they managed to get a backup copy of the blog on 7th March 2026, which was quite ideal because it meant that if they restored it to that, the blog would go back to what it was on 7th March. I only began deleting posts on 11th March. All I would need to do would be to rewrite the seven posts I wrote after 7th March.

So the restoration was done and the blog went back to what it was on 7th March. I rewrote the seven posts, and did some other technical changes to bring the blog back up-to-date. The 5000 posts I had deleted are also back, intact. But the restoration exploded my disk usage and file inodes because now, there were duplicate folders and files, residual cache and temporary files. So, I consulted ChatGPT again and managed to work together with the host to remove all these unnecessary files.

All in, it was a lot of work for an IT-unsavvy person like me, so thank you, ChatGPT! If not for ChatGPT, I wouldn’t have known what to do at all.

Now, all the past memories are intact. I am definitely not deleting them anymore. All that’s left to do now would be to take my time to sift through the posts and recategorise them so that it would be easier if I needed to search for any particular post.

So, if you were a part of our long journey, especially in the past and you wish to relive a memory of a rescue case which we shared together, the story is still here on the blog.

animalcare.my – moving forward, Stories from Home AND Memories from the Past, too!