One lost picture is worth a thousand sighs

Baby and Tiny are not amused that TypePad has caused dozens of our photographs -- including a goodly number of pictures of the Chelsea Grays -- to vanish.

"You will need to re-insert (or re-upload) your image files," writes TypePad bloodlessly, thanking us for our "patience."  Not.  Two or three dozen of our blog images were simply lost in cyberspace during their "rare critical failure" in the wee hours this morning. We discovered the disaster incrementally this morning -- with help and moral support from commenter fp of Sandhill Trek and blogpal Teresa of Technicalities -- and then worked our way back to realizing it was up to us to go back into our files and replace each one, together with its hyperlinks, in each post that had been damaged. It took hours. Here's TypePad's irritatingly bouncy message for your delectation:

Hi Sissy, We experienced a rare critical failure this morning which caused a loss of some published posts and uploaded files. We've managed to restore a large portion of the data, however we were unable to recover certain uploaded files, which may include images from your site.  There will be additional information regarding this situation posted throughout the day on our Status Weblog here: http://status.sixapart.com/ We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and appreciate your patience.

And here's the cute part of that "additional information" from later in the day:

The good news is that the vast majority of the affected blogs have been fully restored without issues. However there was a very small number (less than 2%) of subscribers who have suffered some level of data loss (ie. at least 1 picture).

We guess it depends upon what your definition of "some" is.  One picture here, a couple dozen pictures there . . . pretty soon you're talking about real mental anguish.

Comments

[Teresa]

Ack! What a pain... Your pictures are so good - I'm really sorry you had to go back and upload so many of them again.

Somehow when you are one of the 2% it certainly doesn't help you to hear that... "hey we did pretty good, most everyone else is back to normal"... gee thanks bunches!

Is there any way to backup your picture directory? I don't remember if that was possible back when I was using typepad. If you can, you may just want to do a backup of the entire directory - so if things go blam again - you just have to reload... (but you'd have to keep pretty much up to date with the backup)

[mog]

The explanation, glad you are still here. I was worried when the link went blank. Too bad you had to reupload all your images. That sucks. Btw, I love your images, particularly the kitties and now that they are bigger, they are the cats meow.

[Julie]

How awful to have to do all that work reinstating your photos. Technology is great until it malfunctions. Then, it's a pain!

[ginevra]

hi there -

I'm really sorry you've lost those images. I know that it's a lot of work, and I'm doubly sorry that you feel the reaction of the company wasn't quite what you expected.

TypePad is offering 6 months free service to anyone who lost 1 - 29 photos, and 1 year to anyone who lost more than 30 photos.

If there's anything else I can do, just let me know.

[Jeff]

As Teresa already put it, ACK!

Perhaps it's time to set up your own domain? Nothing is bullet proof I know, but perhaps it might be a bit more so than typepad?

[Carmi]

I cringed when I read this entry. What a horrifying thing to have happen to you.

Something tells me the provider's backup processes are pathetically inadequate. There is simply no excuse for their failure.

[infedellass]

gotsha !!

[BJM]

Bummer...I had a provider go toes up and disappeared the whole blog and my prepaid fees! Fortunately I had a current MT export file...but reloading the blog software and images was a huge job. Maybe Jeff is right...time for a "real" server share.

I have been very happy at Hosting Matters, they have a neat WYSIWYG control panel that makes management a snap and since many of the big blogsdogs are on their servers they really do try extra hard, the tech support is exceedingly patient with server newbies and you can do backups with a provided utility or FTP your folders down, as you like.

However, nothing is perfect, especially in in cyberspace, stuff happens and as you found out even the infamous five "9" rating means a percentile gets screwed over.

;^)