gone but not forgotten

we've kinda stopped and we're not encouraging people to post anything that they want to keep because this blog will be gone when we get the real weblog back up.

All the calls we're getting are very nice, like people calling to check on a sick relative. Poor Mother has a new computer that she's waiting on me to come and get wireless up and running for but she mostly wants to use it to keep up with everybody on the blog. But no blog. :(

The update is that, as I said eariler, we successfully downloaded a backup of everything from the old site. The download ran for hours even though Chris was doing it using a connection much faster than regular broadband. Because it was so huge, tens of thousands of individual files, the early attempts had problems - any file with illegal characters would make the whole transfer stop. Could have been caused by lots of things but I know I've seen photo files with question marks and all kinds of odd characters and configurations. People sending in photos directly from cameras that use wild file naming schemes, ones where the first three attempts didn't make it onto the blog itself but each post attempt put a photo file into the images folder on the server. Not a problem usually but it was somewhat of a problem on the download.

The solution was that we actually had to get the guy in Poland who owns the server space to do what Chris called "TAR it up" from the server side. That's geek speak for make one huge compressed file that could be downloaded where each file name wasn't seen in the transfer. The guy was very nice about doing it. As a matter of fact, ever since screwin' us, he's been really friendly.

So...... Chris has a monster 2 gig "zip" file sitting on his hard drive now and we beleive it's a mirror image of all the Whippleworld files from the beginning of the blog until the day the server stopped. Two things have to happen; first that has to be uploaded to the new server and uncompressed and then WordPress needs to be set up on the new server space. I wish there were more tech people in the group, what's happening now is that Chris and I have both been really, really busy this week. For my part, I'll try to make it a priority for this coming week.

Anybody creating anything with computers needs to know about managing the piles of data that get left behind. I've been learning a lesson here and maybe other people that are following along are picking up a little experience, too.

Besides the fact that people would like the site back up, we're under a little pressure now to test and make sure this backup is good while we still have a backup of the backup. We still have ftp access to the old site where all the data in it's last known working configuration still sits, but we are going to lose that in a few days. I think we're good but we'll never know until we see the blog up and running on the new server. It would be smart to have that happen before the original copy of the data is wiped out. Stay tuned for further adventures.