Well, my sites are back on line! Amazing.
3+ months ago my server ate a line of code in the Plesk control interface. This essentially meant anyone calling into the server hit a dead end, as the server didn’t know who or what it was anymore. The login didn’t work, so even me as an admin couldn’t access it.
Godaddy’s solution - I needed a new box. The good news is that because I run a dedicated server, they managed to save most of my data, as the backup hard drive was unaffected. The production hard-drive, however, was toasty, crispy, fried… 
Crow bars appeared, the backup HD was rescued from the smoking hulk of my dead sever and mirrored onto the new server (for a fee, naturally).
So, I got “most” of my content back, but site’s like this one have gaps where I’d been posting for a few months, but not backing up (lesson learned the hard way) frequently. The current plan is 2 backups - one on the server, the other to an external hard drive at home.
In the end, despite 3 months of emailing and calls every week to GoDaddy Customer Support, I figured out the fix on my own. Fitting since on each call they reminded me I don’t pay for a “supported” machine, so they could only send me documentation from their Help area, but couldn’t actually “Help” me, or answer certain questions…
Trouble was, the reps were mostly clueless. One guy responded by throwing the kitchen sink at me - docs completely unrelated to my application and situation. The laughable bit is that one reference to a completely different server control software system jogged my memory about something on my own system. After a bit of hunting around, I found the errant item, swapped it out and BAM, sites back online!
I do offer my thanks to the guy, because as a result of that interaction, this was sorted out. Not because he knew what he was doing, or paid attention to my account details or my own responses to his questions, but still - he da man!
Last night was my last try - I was about to call Liquid Web and simply hand them the login deets to my server and tell them to take the content and get my sites live. The cost is more than my set up at GD, but I *think* I get server support over there for the price, so it might be worth looking into if anyone wants solid hosting (based on reports from others I trust who use them).
If I can find any missing posts, I’ll repost them - where’s the Wayback machine…? 
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And since I run a couple of blogs/sites myself, it’s easy enough to find “locations to shoot” as it were.
