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hazelchazWebsite Recovery Fund
Hazel's Picture Gallery suffered an incredible blow in July, when the disk drive on the server blew up. Current status of photo page recovery by year: 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Gory details: One night, the motherboard disk controller went crazy, and started deleting random files and directories. This went on for at least eight hours before it was stopped. We were two weeks away from a new, über-backup system coming online; this long-delayed project would have allowed the entire 60 GB server (which housed more than just the 7 GB photos I had there) to be backed up. The only backups we have are from May, and they have everything except photos... which doesn't do us much good.
Recovery process: We have backups of the photos from late 2000 through 2002. (The new backup system has been in the works for two years, which is why we didn't do anything with 2003 and up.. more fool me.) We also have some copies from computers that had temporarily held copies of the photos, so some recent photos will be restored. We may have potentially lost about half of the 28,000 photos that used to live here. Searches on Wayback Machine have yielded up more than 200 photos from 2003, and fewer than 10 photos from 2004. (So I'm missing approximately 6,000 photos from 2003 and the same from 2004.) If you have ganked photos from me before, if you have requested high-resolution images, or if you've contributed photos to my website, it's time to send them to me again, please.
The future: I've signed up for a paid hosting account on Dreamhost, with a 7 GB storage quota (and it goes up every month), and a generous monthly transfer quota (about two or three times the capacity we'd been using in the past, and that goes up every month too). I'm not using a donated fan-run server anymore. This outfit does real backups, they have redundant links, and so forth; stable outfit, good tech support reputation, and they're physically located just a few miles from my house. Also, I have a newly-purchased computer (a Powerbook G4, if you're terminally curious) and I will be using it to collect my photos in the future instead of the borrowed Dell laptop I'd been using in the past. This is the only purpose for the computer, and it has a hard disk bigger than my new server's quota. Furthermore, it can burn CD-ROM backups, so I'll have local copies of anything new on cd-rom as well as on the computer itself.
Meanwhile, the dead disk drive will be poked and prodded to see if it will yield up more of the missing photos, as it had the only copies of my pre-2000 and most of my 2003 to early 2005 photos. Heroic measures may become necessary; it's looking more and more like that every day. By this I mean sending the disk drive into a professional data recovery service, and that's going to cost some money -- on the order of a thousand dollars. I mentioned this at the Worldcon to Naomi Fisher, and she pledged to donate $20 on the spot, and a number of people have volunteered to donate towards the recovery effort, Hence the tip jar. More updates can be found occasionally on my LJ, of course.
If at the end of it all, we can get the data back without spending everything in the Paypal account, I'll apply the money towards the monthly hosting costs that Dreamhost charges me.
Link you can pass around, if you want: http://www.boston-baden.com/donate.htm
Hazel's Picture Gallery suffered an incredible blow in July, when the disk drive on the server blew up. Current status of photo page recovery by year: 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Gory details: One night, the motherboard disk controller went crazy, and started deleting random files and directories. This went on for at least eight hours before it was stopped. We were two weeks away from a new, über-backup system coming online; this long-delayed project would have allowed the entire 60 GB server (which housed more than just the 7 GB photos I had there) to be backed up. The only backups we have are from May, and they have everything except photos... which doesn't do us much good.
Recovery process: We have backups of the photos from late 2000 through 2002. (The new backup system has been in the works for two years, which is why we didn't do anything with 2003 and up.. more fool me.) We also have some copies from computers that had temporarily held copies of the photos, so some recent photos will be restored. We may have potentially lost about half of the 28,000 photos that used to live here. Searches on Wayback Machine have yielded up more than 200 photos from 2003, and fewer than 10 photos from 2004. (So I'm missing approximately 6,000 photos from 2003 and the same from 2004.) If you have ganked photos from me before, if you have requested high-resolution images, or if you've contributed photos to my website, it's time to send them to me again, please.
The future: I've signed up for a paid hosting account on Dreamhost, with a 7 GB storage quota (and it goes up every month), and a generous monthly transfer quota (about two or three times the capacity we'd been using in the past, and that goes up every month too). I'm not using a donated fan-run server anymore. This outfit does real backups, they have redundant links, and so forth; stable outfit, good tech support reputation, and they're physically located just a few miles from my house. Also, I have a newly-purchased computer (a Powerbook G4, if you're terminally curious) and I will be using it to collect my photos in the future instead of the borrowed Dell laptop I'd been using in the past. This is the only purpose for the computer, and it has a hard disk bigger than my new server's quota. Furthermore, it can burn CD-ROM backups, so I'll have local copies of anything new on cd-rom as well as on the computer itself.
Meanwhile, the dead disk drive will be poked and prodded to see if it will yield up more of the missing photos, as it had the only copies of my pre-2000 and most of my 2003 to early 2005 photos. Heroic measures may become necessary; it's looking more and more like that every day. By this I mean sending the disk drive into a professional data recovery service, and that's going to cost some money -- on the order of a thousand dollars. I mentioned this at the Worldcon to Naomi Fisher, and she pledged to donate $20 on the spot, and a number of people have volunteered to donate towards the recovery effort, Hence the tip jar. More updates can be found occasionally on my LJ, of course.
If at the end of it all, we can get the data back without spending everything in the Paypal account, I'll apply the money towards the monthly hosting costs that Dreamhost charges me.
Link you can pass around, if you want: http://www.boston-baden.com/donate.htm
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-19 06:03 pm (UTC)And what was your naming style?
EXIF, and naming conventions
Date: 2005-08-19 06:09 pm (UTC)Naming style: usually it's a short abbreviation, followed by a (usually) 3-digit number, followed by either
.jpg [standard viewing size]
t.jpg [thumbnail]
x.jpg [high-res]
So one of the Con Jose pictures is cj026x.jpg. Some Loscon pictures are named of the form l26a001.jpg etc; "l26 = loscon 26" and the "a' indicates the first day of taking pictures.
It's rare for the filenames to be very long; all the relevant data's stored elsewhere, and I wanted the pages to load fast which included making the filenames as short as practical.
Somethimes the abbreviation is longer, sometimes it's alphanumeric, but that gives you the general idea.
Re: EXIF, and naming conventions
Date: 2005-08-19 06:27 pm (UTC)What Brand and models of digital cameras have you used?
Re: EXIF, and naming conventions
Date: 2005-08-19 06:31 pm (UTC)Olympus D-340R
Olympus D-460 Zoom
Olympus C-220 Zoom
And a number of Fujifilm cameras, including Finepix A101 and 2650.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-21 02:37 am (UTC)I have copies of the shots I took at loscon (2003) on my site. You are welcome to them.
I think the easiest way might be to download the 600 pixel versions from my site. I do have the larger versions if you want them. I could burn a cd.
http://nanidesuka.com/thegina/gallery32/
Any pictures you want from my site are yours. Just let me know if you want me to burn the originals for you and bring them to loscon.
Send them on
Date: 2005-08-21 04:12 pm (UTC)