Well, the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop, and therefore unavailable (even trough archive.org), but here we go:
-If you ever encounter a situation where "well, this volume might contain valuable data" is a thing, try to make a forensically-sound copy first;
-Depending on the exact source media, this might be a very specific process. Don't skip on it, though.
But, once you have an accurate copy of the source media, feel free to run any non-destructive experiments that you'd like. After, of course, publishing the source media for fellow enthousiasts...
> the source site seems to be hosted on an 30-year-old laptop
You're not too far off :)
It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core. This is the first time it's seen any real heavy traffic, and all considered I think it did pretty well with such limited resources.
I did a little postmortem investigation and, surprisingly, it wasn't CPU-bound. A low memory condition killed the database service a couple times. It looks like PHP-FPM was set to scale too aggressively. For the future I've reduced the number of workers it can spawn. Server administration is not my specialty, so this was a fun learning experience!
-If you ever encounter a situation where "well, this volume might contain valuable data" is a thing, try to make a forensically-sound copy first;
-Depending on the exact source media, this might be a very specific process. Don't skip on it, though.
But, once you have an accurate copy of the source media, feel free to run any non-destructive experiments that you'd like. After, of course, publishing the source media for fellow enthousiasts...