💾 Archived View for magda.cities.yesterweb.org › gemlog › 2024-03-20.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:16:48. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-03-21)
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You wouldn't be able to tell by looking at my recent oblog entry: Just two hour prior, I simply wanted to port a post from my public blog on WriteFreely to my capsule, only to notice that both "2024" sub-directories in my Gemini directory were corrupted, rendering all gemlogs and oblogs from this year and the entire folders unusable. A quick investigation revealed that the USB drive hosting said files was beginning to fail, ironically just a few days after I talked to a friend about the vast majority of tech-literate users still not having read the news about cheap USB drives even from respected brands such as Samsung being nothing but worn-out SD cards in an USB case (people on the orange site – Hacker News – still are advising others to buy those "128 GB USB's for $15" because "storage is cheap").
Various files have been corrupted, including my latest archive from my abandoned account on mastodon.social, a bunch of books and notes dealing with programming, one private key and, sadly, a bunch of screenshots and two Linux distribution reviews (Puppy Linux and Solus) once hosted on my now-deleted blog on Medium are gone now. While those old tests have served their respective purposes, one oblog draft set for a rewrite is lost forever. The Mastodon Archive was a recent pull from my now-wiped account, yet I remember having downloaded an archive shortly after my permanent migration to the server of a mutual – this will require some searching, as I don't remember on which device I downloaded it.
A minor panic nearly errupted after seeing that my keys to access the Hidden Nexus, a very small social media site on here, were corrupted, as well. Because this drive also hosts my PGP keys for portability reasons (though not as primary copy), I firt had to ensure that I can rescue those.
Luckily, not only did I find a barely-used and more-reliable USB drive offering twice the amount of space, the majority of the important files, minus my Gemini capsule, are stored locally across all of my devices. I quickly managed to copy every working file, which files are primarily stored on my Asus laptop, to my new drive, restoring all of my collected programming books and notes. The lost gemlog and oblog entries needed to be copied directly from my capsule (thank god I already published them!), while the lost screenshots and reviews aren't a big loss. My key to the Hidden Nexus is stored safely on another device and my PGP keys also got their own drive as their primary storage.
This shall be a prime example of why (redundant) backups are a must because the only files I've still had to set a proper backup for was my local copy of my capsule I carelessly stored on an USB meant as a last-resort backup device in case all of my HDD's and my main USB drive for such stuff breaks or gets lost.