Losing Data

In all the dis­cus­sions about weblogs.com clos­ing down, it’s good to see that people are going to be able to get their data. And that lots of people are step­ping up offer­ing to help con­vert that data into oth­er formats. This is a ser­vice not always avail­able in the com­mer­cial world, unfortunately.

The first (non-blog) ver­sion of laurenwood.org was hos­ted on a com­mer­cial ISP that was sold to someone else, then someone else, etc. Since I’d paid a year in advance (silly me) I did­n’t really notice until it was time to renew, and then I could­n’t find out who to pay! The whois registry gave me a phone num­ber, the people at the end of the phone claimed to not know who I was or what my web­site was, or even the name of the com­pany I’d ori­gin­ally signed up with. It was no sur­prise when that site even­tu­ally just dis­ap­peared from the web. For­tu­nately I’d copied most of the data by then, and now I either host myself or make reg­u­lar backups of sites (such as textuality.com) that are hos­ted elsewhere.