Getting to Photon images or directories for a restore

I’m afraid Photon cannot really be used as a tool to backup your images. Once the original image is deleted, Photon will keep a cached version of that image some time, but will eventually delete it from its cache as well. That’s what happened here: we just don’t have any copy of that image in our cache anymore; if we did you would see it as the URL you posted above:
https://i0.wp.com/dronecoalition.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/QCP-Matrice-I1.jpg?zoom=2.200000047683716&resize=697%2C36

To avoid those issues, I would recommend installing a backup solution that will backup all your site’s files at least daily. Jetpack actually offers such a solution as part of its Premium plans:
https://jetpack.com/features/comparison/

I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.

thanks for the update. It should be noted that “some time” and “almost forever” – which were two descriptions I received of how long photon keeps images, were less than 48 hours in this case. That is, the old WP site that those images were being cached in from expired on a Sat. and on Sun no images were available.

This was just a weird situation where I purchased the site on Friday and their WP expired Sat – so I was transferring articles (XML) using an “Export” plug in that allows to do one or two at a time. This was working fine…until sunday when neither it nor the standard WP XML import would find, download or import those images.

The time frame is interesting because it’s a regular occurrence for any site to be “down” for a couple days – one wonders how photon (WP) made a decision to nuke these so quickly.

I have plenty of backups of my site(s) including vaultpress, but this concerned only a site I was purchasing which was stored on WP at GoDaddy. Their hosting (but NOT their domain) expired that Sat.

Thanks again,

Craig

It should be noted that “some time” and “almost forever” – which were two descriptions I received of how long photon keeps images, were less than 48 hours in this case. That is, the old WP site that those images were being cached in from expired on a Sat. and on Sun no images were available.

That is correct; images can be cached for a long time, but a few things can come into play:

• The images may not have been cached in Photon before Friday.
• In some cases (like a theme change that would change the content width and the width of all Photon media for example), you may trigger a lot of changes with your Photon images; Photon will then come by and recache all the images on the site.
• Photon’s agent may have visited the site on Saturday, got the error when trying to access the images, and this consequently triggered a cache flush.

I unfortunately can’t tell you much more here; I don’t have the data or the logs to investigate further. You probably don’t have access to the old site’s raw access logs anymore either, so it’s going to be hard to find out more I’m afraid.