RE: silvergrain websites are gone but I'm still here
I am so sorry to hear of this really sad news. I feel for you as in a previous life I had a similar misfortune. I wonder if anyone one the list used the IE feature of off-line browsing? If so you might be able to recover some of your valuable data? Thanks for all your hard work Mike -----Original Message----- From: Ryuji Suzuki [mailto:rs@silvergrain.org] Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2007 1:36 PM To: alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca Subject: silvergrain websites are gone but I'm still here I had an awful news on Friday to ruin my weekend completely. Unexpectedly, the server management business from whom I rented a virtual private server to host silvergrain.org, silvergrain.info and a bunch of other sites I operated, disappeared without sending any notice. After doing a bit of search, this business seem to have disappeared some weeks ago, and they repeatedly failed to pay bills to the data center facility. When I learned of this, it was too late, because all equipment (including data backup disks) rented to the server management was already pulled down, cleaned and rented out to a different client. All data and backups are completely destroyed. Therefore, I don't have a snapshot of the sever to recover from. I'm still confused and disappointed. But I just want to let you all know that I'm not disappearing or anything. I'm not quitting photography or silver halide imagnig. One lesson learned: you must use a backup facility operated by an independent business, so that if one fails, the other has a copy. Rental server, VPS and webhosting businesses operate on very thin profit margins and a slight miscalculation can lead them to running battle and then they'll go out of business. I didn't use a cheap company, I checked reviews before having anything with this business, and then proceeded with caution in the beginning. Yet they didn't survive. One can't trust one company to have the data and the backup solutions, since if they fail to pay the bill, the data center will destroy all copies of data and backup at a flip of a switch and rent it out to another client who pays on time. Now about the lost contents. I had photography gallery but I regard the online gallery presentation only as a "notebook." I have made and distributed more assembled work in the form of flash, PDF or in limited cases, prints, so I can wait for some time before rebuilding the site from scratch. Another inconvenience is that silvergrain.info site for Silvergrain chemical user's information is gone. This site had maybe 20 pages of product usage info, some of which are duplicated on digitaltruth.com but others are not. But one good thing here is that I didn't run any business on my sites, so there is no customer database, payment info, etc., stored on the affected server. Also, silvergrain.info was strictly informational site for user convenience and it had no role in the business of chemical manufacturing, distribution and retail, all of which are done by digitaltruth.com. Perhaps the largest inconvenience in this group is that the technical information pages on silvergrain.org are all gone. I'm not sure what I can do about that. They were in mysql database, which was backed up on a backup server in the same facility, now destroyed. There are a few other sites I operated, with varying degree of damage, but they are not of concern to this community. I will have to choose a reliable server management company and set up simple pages for each website, to let the visitors know what happened. But beyond that level, I haven't decided anything about what I will do about them... -- Ryuji Suzuki http://silvergrain.org
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