kurtmckee, posts by tag: data - LiveJournal

Having wiped my computer recently and reloaded everything I know now the relief that comes from having good backups of personal data. However, for a few years I've been using online services such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and Tumblr to host my online posts. Over the weekend, I was shocked to discover that both LiveJournal and Tumblr were simultaneously unreachable; one was upgrading its network and the other was experiencing such a heavy network load that it shut down temporarily.

Yesterday, a friend's Facebook account was suspended due to suspicious activity. She grieved that her account was the only place that some of her photos existed, due to a past hard drive failure. She tried multiple times to have Facebook send her a recovery code email, but her current email provider never received the emails. Eventually the issue was resolved, but it drove home an important point for me: I cannot solely trust the internet to host my data.

To that end, I'd like to import all of my Blogger and LiveJournal entries and comments into a Wordpress installation. Previously I stalled because I wanted a patch I submitted eight months ago to get committed to the Wordpress code; it would fix a LiveJournal import bug. It's never been fixed, but perhaps after this weekend I'll have time to review the code and submit a new patch that will work with the current version of Wordpress.

Almost a half decade ago I installed Ubuntu for the first and only time. Since then I've simply upgraded to the latest version as they've come out, but some time back I decided it would be good to completely reload my PC. The problem immediately became "I have to back everything up", which it turns out was a major undertaking.

Consequently, I've spent a grueling three days combing through my hard drive, looking for anything and everything of value. It's been emotionally taxing to find a lot of memories tucked away like land mines throughout the drive; they're supposed to all be neatly organized into broadly-named directories that I can confidently burn to a DVD without being surprised by the contents...except that they're not.

Be that as it may, it's also been very time-consuming (see "three days", above). I've consolidated everything onto 10 DVDs, but I've additionally had to create an auxiliary user with which to test every possible import I'll need to do after reloading the computer. Turns out things basically work just fine, so I'll rest easy as I wipe clean a drive that I've used for five years straight. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's terrifying! But I have some confidence I won't lose my data.

After reloading the PC I'll write more.