My Entire Web Existence Was rm -r'ed Last Night
I'm too tired to explain the entire chain of events, but the gist is that the shared box that hosted avocado8.com and lori-and-al.com was shut down, and someone with root access deleted all the files. There were no backups.
Over the next few days and weeks I'll be trying to piece together my sites from what I exported from Movable Type earlier this month, files that are on my hard drive, CDs, and web archive sites. For a little while, EVERYTHING will be broken—and sadly, some things will stay that way.
I'm trying to think of this as an opportunity; since every link on both of my sites is currently broken, I might as well re-construct what I can more logically and not worry so much about existing bookmarks. This blog, for example, now uses MT's new-style archive links, so if you have links or bookmarks to individual posts, you should update them. The Ice Hockey Escapades will move back to avocado8 (where it started), and all the entries that are currently in static HTML files—entries I wrote in Dreamweaver before I knew about blogging tools (before some even existed)—will be moved into a Movable Type database.
I'm not sure if about town (san francisco) can be re-constructed. Ditto the book and movie reviews. Many images from The Ice Hockey Escapades are gone forever.
I'm relieved to report that I was able to salvage all the avocado8 blog posts between January 9 and January 26 from Google's cache, though I lost some of the comments (I'm especially sad that I lost three of the four comments on the Leaky post).
In any case, if you're just here for the blog, you're all set. If you're looking for something else on the site, you're out of luck for the moment. (You may have noticed that the entire "Also By Me" section in the sidebar is gone. It'll be returning—hopefully—a little at a time) Please bear with me while I switch to a new hosting provider and try to rebuild what was a large part of my identity while also keeping my real life going. My sites aren't the only things that are devastated.
About Town Lives
I can't quite believe it, but I found ALL the images that go in the about town (san francisco) blog on various backup CDs. I hope I'm as lucky with about town II (philadelphia).
In thinking about how I want to rebuild things, I've reconsidered moving The Ice Hockey Escapades back to avocado8.com. Although it started on this site, the entries I'm adding now are really about Al's hockey experiences as much as mine. So it seems fitting that it should stay on lori-and-al. It's going to take a long time to get all the older entries into Movable Type (there are 70 static pages, many with two entries on them), and as I mentioned, many of the images have been lost. I'm grateful that I was able to recover—through backup CDs and archive.org—all the text, at least. I know that blog has helped several women (and men!) get started on the ice or at least feel better about their beginner experiences, and it helps *me* keep perspective about my own hockey skills.
By the way, thanks to everyone who commented and e-mailed and AIMed me about archive.org. Since my e-mail access went down with the site, Jay (who AIMed) was first. :) It's a very useful site in general (and especially for getting the old hockey entries, which date from 2000 to 2003), but I found Google much more helpful for reconstructing the entries for this blog. I'd never noticed the "Cached" link for each result before; thanks to Al for pointing it out.
I still have a long way to go here, but I'm feeling more hopeful tonight than I was last night (and on Sunday night, when I was freakin' despondent). I still do have a long parenthood post I've been working on (locally, thank god) that I need to finish, and more parenthood and philadelphia observations have occurred to me in the past two days as well. It just didn't seem right to post them when I have so much reconstruction work ahead of me. Anyway, please continue to bear with me—I hope to be (and to have the sites) back to normal soon.
About Town II Is Back II
Yay, another blog makes a comeback. about town II is now live again!
Nightmares and Backups
For the past few nights I've had a hard time getting back to sleep after the 4am, 5am, or 6am feeding (the time varies depending on how long Austen decides to sleep). What keeps me awake is usually remembering one more thing that's gone forever. Like the slideshow of Annie photos. The photos of our trip to Mechanicsburg. The New Zealand photo journal. Basically, photos everywhere are gone.
Because I didn't have a lot of space on my hard drive, I tended to use my web server as my backup drive. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I know—why I never zipped up the whole Annie slideshow (or the photos from the kitchen remodel, or the photos from Korea, or countless other cropped, filtered, and captioned images that took hours to create) and saved it off to a CD, I don't know. I'm just an idiot, I guess.
Even when I'm sleeping I find myself dreaming of directories and backup CDs and missing files. I navigate through folder hierarchies, flailing about for bits of memories and moments lost.
Sure, I at least had the sense to save the huge original image files off to CD, but I'm not sure, even if I had enough time to crop and filter all those images again, that I could write captions with the same level of detail or passion. When I wrote about Annie, I was still crying daily (often hourly) over her. When I wrote about Mechanicsburg, we'd just gotten back, and the memories of what we'd done and how we felt about it were fresh in my mind. At least the kitchen remodel was chronicled in the lori-and-al blog, so I just have to re-construct the thumbnail and full images. About 100 of them. <sigh>
Can you tell that I'm having a moment of despair?
More On Sleeping Through the Night
Austen slept for 7 hours straight on Saturday night (and I didn't soak the sheets with breastmilk!). It was lovely, for a couple reasons: (1) I also got to sleep for 7 hours straight, and (2) I didn't end up lying awake in bed at 4:30 in the morning thinking about missing files.
This morning Austen woke after only 4 hours, and after an only partially-successful attempt at feeding him in the side-lying position, I found myself awake—with pasty mouth, burning eyes, and swirling thoughts. I finally managed to finish the feeding at 4:45, but despite a desperate desire to get back to sleep, I couldn't help mourning lost belly photos.
And then I thought, "I *know* I burned a CD off my Windows machine before the baby was born." So I got up, went downstairs, and prepared to pry open the CD burner in search of it. No need: When I removed the stack of papers waiting to be filed from on top of the burner, the CD revealed itself, gloriously labeled with phrases like "belly_web", "remodel_web", "cruise_web", and "blog images".
It's not everything, but it's a start. The belly photos I'd been trying to re-construct for the pregnancy archives were all there. Annie's memorial pictorial was there. Our trip to Mechanicsburg. The photos from our "last hurrah" cruise and kitchen remodel (links coming as soon as I rebuild the ~ lori and al ~ blog). As soon as I finish uploading, I can go back to bed.
Of course, that's when Austen will wake up.
Apologies for Anxiety
To those of you who started visiting avocado8 during the pregnancy (or the election; they were going on at the same time)—and also to those who've been reading this blog for years—I want to apologize. Not for all the broken links, but for blogging about all the broken links. Just because they're tormenting me doesn't mean they should be tormenting you.
To attone for my recent bout of manic-depressive blogging, I offer this photo of Al and the Beaner watching the Super Bowl last night. (Too bad the Eagles didn't win!)
Home Sweet Homepage
Instead of just linking to the rm -r post, there's now something at http://www.avocado8.com/. (In other words, the face is back!) Once I get the book reviews (and possibly the movie reviews) back up, those will also be linked from the home page.