Jean Snow [.net] Is Dead

JeanSnow.net just died on me.

To my absolute shock, the hosting company I’ve been using for 10 years, TextDrive, suddenly shut down – they apparently made it public at the start of March that they were closing down on March 14, but they never sent out any notices. It’s looking like I will not be able to get the data back (there is a slight chance, but I’m not counting on it), and the last full local backup I did was in August of 2011. This affects my personal blog, which I’ve been doing for about 13-14 years – it’s that blog that led to me starting a writing career, before I got involved with PechaKucha – as well as my other sites (PauseTalk, The Magaziner, and Codex). 

All gone.

Is it my fault for not doing regular backups of all this stuff? Partly. But this situation angers me to no end – how they could do this without sending any notice so I could go in and make sure I downloaded all my data is beyond me (and yes, I have checked my spam folder extensively). 

Unfuckingbelievable.

Checking the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, luckily it did do a grab of my main site on March 18, and so I’ll at least be able to recover all of the posts I had written – PauseTalk was grabbed on March 5, and The Magaziner in January, so I’ve lost a few posts for that site.

I’ve quickly put up this Tumblr site, as I start to recover from all this madness, and hopefully I’ll manage to migrate all of my content here – as much as they say not to trust big companies (like Tumblr, or Yahoo for that matter) at least you can expect to get an early – and very public – warning before anything gets shutdown, with time to export everything. 

But yeah, this really fucking sucks. It’s not what I wanted to deal with on a relaxing Sunday afternoon-turning-into-evening. For a while, before I found those 2011 backups, I thought I had suddenly lost my entire blogging history.

It felt like I had lost a limb.