OK so I lied...

[telophase]

...I told someone that I wasn't making any more posts about the LJ brouhaha, but this is slightly related. XD

My reaction to people complaining about archives and backfiles being purged or vanishing is:

If you do not have at least two different backups of data, one of them offsite (preferably both, and in two different places), then you do not have a backup.

Don't rely on any one site, service or piece of equipment to hold data for you. If you mod a community or an archive, arrange for backup of content and keep it up-to-date. Check your backup methods and materials on a regular basis, and consider re-archiving regularly.*

This has been your public service announcement for the day.




* Eight or so years ago, when I was working in the slide collection and talking with other slide collections about a digital archive, the University of Colorado slide librarian told me that when they looked into it, they found that the lifespan of a CD was 5 years. They committed to a program of re-burning their entire digital collection every year and a half, to prevent any potential data loss.

Comments

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Okay! I am buying an external hard-drive on my lunch break. Between you and my brother and my latest malware insanity, I am now convinced. I mean, I knew I should, I just....backup is so much work. I will do it, though!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

:) I don't completely practice what I preach, but I've gone through a hard-drive crash before where I lost a lot of stuff, I know good and well that I can't complain if I lose the stuff I haven't backed up.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

I wasn't aware there was a way to back up everything on Livejournal.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Three choices:

1. Material doesn't appear spontaneously on LJ. You have to put it in. If you're typing in something you want saved, you also save it elsewhere.

2. You can export a month's worth of entries at a time with the export tool (http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml).

3. Some of the downloadable clients (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=158) like Semagic have a backup function.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Cool! I didn't know about the export tool, I think it may come in handy. And I'm dumb- I use seamagic and didn't know there was a backup function.

[morgandawn.livejournal.com]

I've been pouring over my copy of Semagic and cannot find the backup tool. Also the sourceforge site and google. Is it something...obvious I am missing?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I don't use Semagic; I was reporting information passed on to me that is apparently wrong. But LJArchive works, as a later commenter says.

[morgandawn.livejournal.com]

nods I use LJarchive and can recommend it. I am always looking for alternatives/better methods.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

You can also use LJ Archive (http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive/) to save a copy of all of your journal entries to date, and all the comments. It has some neat features like word regression analysis, too.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Some of that stuff looks really cool.

[rabican.livejournal.com]

Yeah, uh ... guess who's trying to back up scans_daily right now? ARGH.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

A task I do not envy you...

[rabican.livejournal.com]

"Downloading comments, 217990 of 499647..." This is actually my second try - last night it failed on me.

The problem is that s_d is basically built on a) images, many many images, and b) community interaction, both of which are ... not easy to back up in any methodical, regular way, like fic? Certainly .pdf files like ljbook are out of the question, so ljarchive is the best bet. Alas, that only works so long as the images are still remotely hosted somewhere, but it's better than nothing.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah, at least the commentary is still there, and someone can always go dig up a copy of the book if they need to see it that badly. :D

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Ye gods. I hurt for you.

[arkanefyre.livejournal.com]

Yes. I learned that lesson quite well. I had two 250 gb external hard drives brimming with stuff (they had around 100mb left in both of them), and I was doing an external case switch. I was plugging them in when the phone rang, and I forgot which plug was which. I plugged, turned the both drives on, I hear harddrive running, and then pop! fizzz~ smoke. I burnt both my harddrives in a span of 15 seconds, and lost over 450gb worth of stuff. January 24th, 2006. Sad, sad day. RIP.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ouch!

So far I haven't managed to personally kill more than one group of pictures at a time (running a Photoshop batch action to make them smaller for web display and completely not noticing that I was saving the now-smaller images over the original images and not in a separate folder). *crosses fingers*

[arkanefyre.livejournal.com]

*snort*

You know, just after I commented, I decided to save the statistics project I was working on.

Guess what? Lightening struck, and our whole school network went down. Four times consecutively.

And guess what? The drive I was saving my project to? Completely wiped out.

That was God smiting me on the last day of senior year. And probably for being a Buddhist. XD;;

Luckily, my stats teacher was nice and understanding, since I've worked on the project during class and she's seen my project. But geez. Really. That was 10 hours of work.

[cicer.livejournal.com]

If I've learned nothing else about computers in my life, it's that you can never have too many backups. I used LJ archive and the export tool to get two different copies of my journal. Currently they're just on my laptop, but once my external drive comes in the mail in a couple days, they're gettin' backed up on that too. I may burn them to a disk as well. Paranoid? Moi? Surely not! XD

[viridian5.livejournal.com]

...I'm trying to figure out how to actually download the thing from the SourceForge site. I clicked a few buttons, only to hit a dead end. Am I really this dumb?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Semagic? http://semagic.sourceforge.net/index.html - right at the top, pick your OS. (and it turns out it doesn't back up - I was wrong)

LJArchive? http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=143280 - I think you have to dl the files individually.