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"In recognition of the inconvenience we have caused"
"Stella, Pista, Major, and Shelby in the background totally uninterested in these fools," goes the caption of this fetching photo (snacks being held just off camera, upper left) of the "six apart dogs" by Ginevra Kirkland of n-judah love song, who offers a personal apology on behalf of SixApart in the comments to our previous post. Apologies accepted, Ginevra. And thanks again, so very much, to our wonderful readers for their moral and technical support as we scrambled to get the visual portion of our program back up to speed in the last period of time.
"We will be extending your TypePad subscription free by 12 months in recognition of the inconvenience we have caused," writes SixApart Chairman & CEO Barak Berkowitz in a personal email apology for the recent unpleasantness at the server. Thank you, sir. A very nice corporate response. He explains:
You are receiving this email from me because I want to explain and apologize for a problem with the TypePad service that has affected your weblog . . . We were able to restore all of your published blogs and posts from our database backups. But due to a problem with our normal backups we could not recover a number of uploaded files, including photos, videos and other linked files.
Unfortunately your account, http://sisu.typepad.com/, including your blogs and photo albums, if any, were among the blogs affected, and as many as 189 files were not recoverable by our system. At this point the only solution is for you to restore this data from your personal files.
Yes, we know, having taken care of that yesterday -- with the help of our friends -- as blogged here. The silver lining was that of the 189 possibly lost image files in the list sent us by Mr. Berkowitz, "only" 25 were unrecoverable from their database, and all of those were on file here in our own computer drives. What with the usual sluggishness of TypePad's editing program -- lots of waiting between each step and the next throughout the process of reloading images -- we spent an average of perhaps 10 minutes on each image. That would give us a total of 250 minutes or just over four hours. With the $150 saved by SixApart's lovely waiver of a year's subscription, that's $37.50 per hour for our effort, considerally more than we usually make blogging. Mr. B. adds further enticements for us to stick with the program:
We have reviewed and modified our back-up procedures to ensure that this type of problem never recurs. We are also doing a complete audit of our operations procedures to make sure that all our procedures meet or exceed industry standards.
Even prior to this problem we were planning a move of our server operations to a center with even more redundancy, capacity and a very high level of protection from natural disasters. At the same time we are creating a new emergency recovery facility in case of a massive disaster that would allow us to restart the service quickly from a separate physical location.
Okay. We'll stay. Just make sure your emergency recovery facility is above sea level.
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