Hi,
Your InfinityFree account epiz_28085621 (Website for dungeonsanddata.infinityfreeapp.com) has been deleted.
The account has has been inactive for a while. To make room for new accounts, we automatically deleted inactive accounts after some time.
When your account was deleted, all files, databases, settings and all other contents have been completely and permanently removed from our systems. Any domain names previously assigned to the hosting account have also been removed, and can now be assigned to other hosting accounts again.
Since the account is fully deleted, it cannot be reactivated or backed up anymore.
If you want to host a website with us, please don't hesitate to create a new hosting account from your client area.
I received the above email stating my website had been deleted due to inactivity. I had a database and quite a bit of code on there that I worked extremely hard on. I did not know this could or would happen, and I was not given any warning prior to this occurring. The email says it cannot be recovered, but I find it hard to believe that there are no backups or anything where my data could be pulled from.
If there is anyway at all to get my databases and site files back on line, I would be deeply appreciative.
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Try checking your spam box (At least 2 times per month), the warning emails may have landed there. IF sends out emails before accounts are suspended for inactivity.
Unfortunately, your account, databases, and files are really gone, and there is no way to recover them. This can be a hard way to learn the lesson of “Always have a backup”, but sometimes, these lessons are needed in life. Your account was suspended because no one visited, or logged into it in a long time, and this usually means that the owner has stopped working on / supporting the site, and is a signal to the servers of wasted space. Although this is not the case for you, it is what the servers saw and assumed. To prevent this in the future, make sure you actively check your email (even spam), and login to the control panel of the account at least twice a month (In case IF experiences email outages). The best way of course, is to always have a backup so you can gust create a new account, and re-upload without losing anything.
I apologize if you lost all of your work, but there is nothing we, or anyone else can do to recover your data.
Sorry.
I just checked, and I did not receive warnings, anywhere, in any of my inboxes. I understand that nothing can be done to recover it, but this is the first I heard (or could have reasonably been expected to hear) about this even possibly happening. There is nothing in any of my spam folders. The only emails I have from infinity free are this one, and the ones confirming my account creation back in March.
There really are no site backups at all that would have my data? It’s been purged from all the backups simultaneously?
Unfortunatelly, although comprehensible since this is a free service, InfinityFree doesn’t store or even create backups. There never was any backup because they’re never created in the first place.
That is weird. There may have been an email error at some point. I’m sorry that you have never heard about this, but it is listed in the TOS, which you should have read, but deffenetly agreed to.
Unfortunately, no. Also, free hosting does not have backups. It is the user’s responsibility to always have a backup of their files as @alexvf said.
Okay, I get it. It really sucks. I just assumed a big org/host would have backups. I assume there are backups of your own data and sites, just not the user generated stuff.
I am a “free customer” just like you.
My data is backed up in my computer. Not in InfinityFree’s servers.
I’ve seen too many episodes in these forums like the one you’re experiencing. I know better by now.
iFastNet doesn’t do backups of free or premium accounts. Technical measures are taken to ensure that data is protected against hardware failure and the like, but that’s it. We don’t have point in time snapshots.
Trusting your hosting provider to handle backups for you is not a great idea in the first place. If your hosting provider doesn’t let you access the backups, for example due to policy disputes, not payment or just because they are being annoying, your backups are worthless. And even then, since you don’t control the frequency and retention of the backups, you have no guarantee that the backups contain the data you’re looking for.
Additionally, creating backups puts a lot of stress on the storage system, and requires a lot of storage space to be kept. We’d rather use that server space for actual website hosting than storing copies of sites that most likely are not going to be used in the first place.
We also don’t backup our own sites. We only backup our databases. Website files are handled differently and don’t need backups.