U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: silvergrain websites are gone but I'm still here

Re: silvergrain websites are gone but I'm still here



Ryuji,

Very sorry to hear about what happened to your site.  It's too bad that this company did not take care to see that you got copies of everything.  Good  luck rebuilding!

I suppose you  also  lost the structure of your website that was developed?

Mark Nelson

PS:  What about the sites that mirror sites on the internet....would there be anything there?


In a message dated 8/18/07 3:39:44 PM, rs@silvergrain.org writes:


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






Best Wishes,
Mark Nelson

Precision Digital Negatives - The System
PDNPrint Forum at Yahoo Groups
www.MarkINelsonPhoto.com






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