jesus - that's unbelievable! very, very sad. seems incredible they didn't have any more recent backups, but i guess we're all guilty of that. just shows you what a fragile online world we all live in...

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i hope for ani's sake she backupped (?) her own journal, she had so many entries there ...

I'm surprised the host wasn't doing that for them. We've been here on the same server for a similar length of time, and have had disk failures before, but the oldest backup Imhosted ever had to resort to was a week old. That seemed like a disaster when it happened - remember when we suddenly lost a week's worth of posts? - but something like this really puts that in perspective.

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sucks about there drive dieing, but what is diary x?

if($pappo == "beaten"){
print("it beats pappo");
}

I believe a brief incarnation of Boinng ran entirely through diary-x.

Very true - just before Giz introduced me to the wonders of PHP Nuke (a vague descendant of which the site still runs today) the site was briefly built around a number of interconnected diary-x accounts, with various members having their own page on "boinng" (which were actually just diary-x hosted accounts using matching boinng designs). That and the old ezboard forum were the closest we could get to a proper interactive site, until work started on the current behemoth and the rest, as they say, is history.

Rather glad the old diary-x based system didn't really take off, on balance..

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It was a little like Livejournal - a blogging site, dating back to about 2000 I think. Never quite as big as some, but still home to a few thousand(?) long running diaries and journals, now all sadly lost. In internet terms, quite a devastating event really.

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total bummer that d-x has died. i kind of remember backing up my ladibugg journal but i havent been able to find it yet (not looked terribly hard, honestly). but there were other journals i had there (with a bit more anonymity) that i know i didnt back-up, including the journal i was keeping for Lawrence and the journal that Damien and i kept together for a while. when i first read the announcement it felt like someone kicked me in the gut.. i mean, it's been a long while since i've posted anything in my ladibugg journal, but i was still so connected to it that d-x was still my home page and i still visited it several times a day. they are rebuilding the site, which you can read about at http://www.diary-x.com if you're interested. still not sure if i'll be joining in there or if i'll pick up a different tack and maybe host something on my own domain. or maybe i'll go back to a paper journal. geez, remember those?

it's aweful that the host didnt have any more recent backups. i've left a couple of different hosts for that exact reason -- when they boast nightly backups they should actually do it (or at least on a semi-regular basis). i dont know anything about the host Stephen was using, or whether they boast about their backups or not, so please dont think that i'm trying to blame them for what happened. it just sucks that there werent any, by anyone...

i don't care no i wouldn't dare to fix the twist in you (Sick Puppies : All The Same)

it does, doesn't it

From what I've read, it seems there wasn't really a host as such - just Stephen running his own server, trying to do everything himself (or perhaps having to do everything himself, due to the bandwidth costs he'd have had to deal with otherwise). Which of course makes him responsible for maintaining the backup, or not maintaining it in this case. But there for the grace of god, really - it's a simple mistake that anybody could make, and you can be sure he'll be punishing himself for it now.

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i thought i read somewhere that he had it hosted elsewhere, that all he had was a mac powerbook which he used to write and admin the site (which was having it's own drive issues for which he asked for donations to fix but said donations went toward trying to recover the server drive instead) but that the physical drive was not under his control. but i cant find where i read that, so i could well have made it up (nearing 30 and the ol' memory is slipping).

i don't care no i wouldn't dare to fix the twist in you (Sick Puppies : All The Same)

you might be right - at the moment the domain is pointed at http://www.dreamhost.com, so maybe they're responsible, but they do offer unmanaged as well as managed services so who knows. I just got the impression from what was said about Drivesavers that Stephen had taken charge of the drive in question himself, whereas if it was the host at fault surely it'd be their responsiblity to fix the drive (or at least be liable for the bill).

Either way, I'll tell you one thing - I downloaded a backup of this place today, and I intend to do that a bit more often in future too.

This message was edited by:Tim on 2006-03-09 11:55

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