Not the way to handle a backlog.
I know I've gotten behind on my notifications. And every so often, I'd make time, go through a few pages of them. This helped, but was not the entirety of it. Using it as a gallery of things you'd have to be good and ready to do, like pages of work that'd have to be assembled in one folder while you gather another in folder 2, and keeping the pages of jokes with friends separate from similar from a different site, while indexing artist #5 over there as well- was something I should have paid more attention to. Hell, some people I've followed, like DamnEvilDog and King Cheetah, have died. Now the FA mods have instituted the deletion of every notification over a year old. Yes, we shouldn't be leaving it there forever, but some of us didn't know this would happen. There's always things you could have solved with some warning, and could have gotten solved to the point of "at least it wasn't _that_ bad."
Now it is that bad because many of us have gotten screwed on the notification system.
"Download X's entire gallery and deal with it yourself" not found.
I'm sure that the staff was forced to do this, but that also just means that they couldn't find a way to NOT do this to the FA members. If you have a backup of the full site, then that would mean you have a backup of people's notifications and could have added that too. In the message from on high, they say that the old notifications took up a lot of room. There must have been many, since they're just html and text that leads to picture files, not the files themselves. We must trust the mods, and they seem honest at this, but they did manage to screw us over in this.