Sat 15 Feb 2020
My thought is that everything online is only temporary.
That particular concept was thoroughly tested yesterday. You may not have noticed, but this blog was all but offline for 24 hours beginning Thursday night. Nothing disappeared, thank goodness, but I couldn’t access any of the management tools for the blog, including editing and posting. No one could leave comments, either. (If you tried and failed, please try again.)
I can’t explain things I don’t really understand myself, so I won’t go into details, but my son-in-law Mark says it was a “database server error.”
While working our way through that, Mark discovered that there is a new hosting plan scheduled to take effect on March 28, after which certain incompatibilities (which I won’t even try to get into) will mean that all 13 plus years of blogging here on M*F will disappear. There may be an extension of the date, and (who knows) the “incompatibility” issue may be worked out, but in the meantime, I will be doing my best to back up and preserve as many of the thousands of posts as I can.
If worst comes to worst, I will most certainly start over again. There’s only so much reading and watching I could do without being able to write about it all too, and I know that holds true for the many other contributors to this blog as well.
And while I’m busy backing up an archive of the “Best of Mystery*File,” regular blogging will go on as usual. Count on it!
February 15th, 2020 at 11:35 am
You didn’t dodge the bullet; you caught it in your teeth & spit it out!
February 15th, 2020 at 3:49 pm
Well, figuratively, maybe. But I do like the imagery!
February 15th, 2020 at 5:07 pm
At least you were notified. My local library switched systems and my 15 years of reading history just disappeared, without my having been notified, and “it can’t be recovered.” (Too much trouble, I think.) I used that history a lot; this was a real bummer.
February 16th, 2020 at 12:29 am
It’s terrible when something like that happens. It’s like someone stealing your diary. It really is.
February 15th, 2020 at 6:41 pm
I’m very sorry to hear this.
Mystery*File is a huge cultural treasure.
Hope this can all be worked out.
February 15th, 2020 at 7:45 pm
Yes, Mike is right about MYSTERY*FILE being a cultural treasure. Not just about mystery novels but also pulps, paperbacks, conventions, collecting, films, and all sort of literary things that help to make life worth living.
Every day I check in with Mystery*File. We must not lose the archives.
February 15th, 2020 at 10:50 pm
MysteryFile is a major reference source, sorry to hear this.
February 16th, 2020 at 12:31 am
I’ll do my best to salvage what I can, but it’s a huge huge job.
February 16th, 2020 at 2:08 am
It’s possible that much of Mystery*File is backed up at archive.org.
I know my entire site is.
Don’t know about blogs.
Also, there might be “blog back up” software.
February 16th, 2020 at 2:15 am
There is also Archive-It (which I just learned about):
https://archive-it.org/
Don’t know if it might help.
February 16th, 2020 at 8:57 am
Mike
Looking into such solutions now, but keep the suggestions coming!
February 16th, 2020 at 10:11 am
Mystery*File isn’t merely a cultural treasure – it’s an international cultural treasure. Would starting a GoFund to save it help?
BTW: Did anybody else get hit by that Windows “update” last week? I just got my computer back from the shop and am noticeably poorer for it. What if everybody who suffered said update submitted their repair bills to Microsoft? I’ve read that they’re worth $126 billion.
February 16th, 2020 at 6:23 pm
I don’t know if you mean the upgrade I had to make in changing from Window 7 to Windows 10, but I recently had to do it and no, it it did NOT go well. Mark (son-in-law) had to help, extensively. No internet at first, then a problem of the computer shutting all the way off on its own without warning.
February 17th, 2020 at 8:56 am
Over the past decade, random bunches of Mystery*File have been saved in archive.org, in its Wayback Machine. Sometimes comments are saved; sometimes not. The saved posts look beautiful.
Only a fraction of the Mystery*File entries have been saved by this process. Still, it’s a start!
archive.org allows users to request a page to be saved.
In theory, one could click on each monthly batch of Mystery*File, such as July 2011 or March 2018, and request a save. This would be a long process: 120 monthly batches over the last 10 years!
You can download an app, that allows the save to be done with a button. This would make things easier.
archive.org is not ideal. Stuff saved in the Wayback Machine there can NOT be searched by Google. It will save pages for posterity – but not allow people to find stuff through searches.
A suggestion:
Steve might publish the name of his blog software, and link to any pages where that software describes the coming change.
This would help computer experts to see what the trouble is.
They could also search the Internet, to see if anyone has come up with a fix yet.
I’ll keep thinking.
February 17th, 2020 at 9:04 am
I’m not a blogger – my site is pure web-pages, NOT a blog.
So I know little about blog technology.
But:
What do other bloggers do to save their entries?
Steve might send out a letter to bloggers he knows, asking them to tell their saving methods.
Something might work on Mystery*File too!
(My own site is simple to back-up. It’s just a bunch of web-page files. It takes 2 minutes to copy the file directories to a flash drive. I’m guessing that saving a blog is trickier.)
February 17th, 2020 at 9:11 am
Question:
Does the blog software that Steve uses, have an “Export” function?
February 17th, 2020 at 9:14 am
archive.org saves text and pictures well.
But it does NOT save video links usually.
IMHO this is no big loss.
Such links tend to get removed or broken anyway over time.
February 17th, 2020 at 10:53 am
Here’s what Mark told me yesterday about software programs for backing up blogs:
I’ve tried them. They don’t do anything we can’t do manually. They copy your entire WordPress folder set and then copy the database. Both of which are easy enough to do. And any up-to-date blog backup plugin is liable to be looking for the latest (or newer) database version, whereas we’re running one several versions behind.
Even though we’re up and running again, I’m still going to talk with the PHP guy I know to see if he can/will help update the database so we can use it to restore the blog once we move to a new hosting plan. If we try that, I’ll need to download a backup of your current database which will then be frozen at that point in time. When we re-import that database into a new WordPress site, anything posted after the initial backup will be missing. So I want to have the new hosting plan in place and a new WordPress install done before we grab the database. I can go in today and backup what we have just in case, but I’ll grab a more recent database backup again before we make the move so I have the latest iteration.
All that said, that Updraft program might be worth a shot. Although I still think it won’t be able to migrate your current site to a new site in the new hosting plan because the database versions are way off.
February 17th, 2020 at 4:23 pm
Mark’s note sounds good.
Plenty of reason for optimism!
I’ll share info with some computer friends.
Getting everything working in WordPress, sounds better than archive.org.