In 2002, I started keeping an online diary at Diary-x which was founded and run by Stephen Deken. I really liked it because it was in a traditional diary style. I wasn't used to blog styles and didn't particularly care for them at the time. I also liked that I could lock personal entries. It also seemed to be a pretty close knit community, one I felt comfortable with. But as our family website started growing and growing my little diary seemed a little redundant, I guess, and I neglected it. I decided to stop posting there and had a feeling I should back-up the whole thing--and thankfully I did, using the tools Stephen provided.
Disaster ... and just a few days after I backed up. I went back to read my favorites on Diary-x and it was gone! The server had crashed. Stephen has been running the whole show since the beginning and as the community grew, so did his responsibilities in other areas--wife, expecting a child, etc. He needed help. And he made the biggest mistake everyone warns us about...he didn't back up.
How many of us screw up like that? I do and I get so mad at myself when I lose an entire entry because I didn't hit save periodically. Well, multiply that now by years of entries and numbers of diarists and you have a true cyber catastrophe. Stephen hoped to be able to get it fixed but to compound things, it just can't be done. I'm sure he feels terrible. Members of the diary-x community who paid for the service (there weren't that many of us, I guess) are very angry and feel betrayed.
It's just terrible. On the up side, Stephen did post a data base so that we in the community could find each other again. So far, I've found Red Nose, Absolutely Peachy, and Yakkety-Yak. So I'm going to link to them from here and keep checking the database and hopefully find more of my favorite bloggers.
RIP, Diary-X. Stephen, I can't be mad at you. I know that you must feel horrible about all this.
Posted by Cassie at February 28, 2006 11:14 AM | TrackBack