Oufffballsworld

When you read this, you don't know I've been away on vacation to the coast previous week.  I tend to preschedule posts during my absence as to hide my absence during a vacation.

So I had "write blog posts" in my planning at the start of August.  I open the tab that's usually open somewhere in my browser and I'm staring at a box on the screen. "This blog has been suspended" it states.  It will get deleted in 90 days.

I stare in confusion and disbelief.  Huh what? I check the upperleft corner: yep it's me that's logged in. The entire menu is gone. 

Quickly I type my blog url in a new browser tab and stare at the page mentionning that the blog Goofballsworld doesn't exist anymore.  Am I hacked? Did someone access and erase my blog? Nope the info on my screen actually states that I violated the community guidelines. What the hell, I surely did not. 
In a stress, I contact a lot of friends and ask them if they can still view my blog.  Nope, none of them can't, as my blog would not exist anymore.

This can't be real. This blog has been my diary for 21 years already now. It dates from before my move to Leuven, before my marriage, before so many travels, before owning a spot in the east of Belgium, before getting children and being a mom, before losing my father, ...  It can't be just gone like that.
Well in fact it can. Somehow I know what a risk it is at put all this info in a hosted platform I cannot control. A blogger service that has become a dinosaur: how long will google continue to support it? My blog is so huge that in the last years, back-ups simply failed from its sheer size.

But somehow I don't believe it. I read the message again. I've violated the community standards.  No I didn't.  It's a mistake and Google will realise it. I can click to demand a review, which I do.  It feels like I'm affected by a bug by Google that will get fixed again.  While I feel emotional and stressed, there is no total panic yet as I can't truly believe it would be gone.
And at the same time there's also some peace that I feel: the blog started in an impulsive unguarded moment and has become so important to me that I'd never voluntarily stop. But if it simply disappeared, how would it change my life, my time use, the legacy that I wanted to leave (to my children mainly).  It would be an incredible shame to have lost 21 years of logging my life. But in the end it would not have changed my life? 

Who was I kidding, I surely hoped Google would fix it.  And Google would need to help me doing so.  I explained everything in Gemini and asked for advice in steps to take.  Appeal the decision: check done.  File a support case on a forum (since you can't contact a google customer service)....fine, did that following the template information I got suggested.  I also went to my google account and take-out and actually managed to download and launch a new back-up which worked. It had to be split up in so many pieces and arrives in an unreadable structure to me of subfolders etc, but I got 66GB of back-up downloaded after all.  So if all failed, I should be able to load that back into a new platform or so ? I also surved to the internet archive org and see how much of my blog got indexed there.


Then in fact I found the email of the night before (when we had visitors, and I had not caught up with the emails yet) that Google announced this to me. 

Needless to say that a lot of the day I had spent reasearching this case and working on downloading my blog back-up, while I settled in waiting.  But that afternoon already I got the anticipated mail: They had reviewed the decision and reinstated my blog.  Ploof, and there it was back within 24 hours of absence as if nothing had happened. All back to normal, just I have no 66GB of folders worth as back-up, uncertain how to use it and impossible to update incrementally (according to Gemini). Ugh.



Oufffffff.  That was the sentiment though. A big sigh of relief.  Or as Anne said in a chat: it was ouffffballsworld that day.