Morgan, so it sounds like the data recovery service has done a lot of work already. Are they not going to bill you at least part of that $2,500 even if you stop now? If so, I don't think most people would want their money back, even if you stop now, but are still stuck with a substantial bill. In fact, I'd send in a contribution to help with what you've already incurred, even if you don't proceed.
Regards,
Jerry Moos
Big Spring, Texas, USA
> From: Morgan Fletcher <morgan@hahaha.org>
\r?\n> Subject: Re: [CR] Wool Jersey
\r?\n> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
\r?\n> Date: Monday, July 20, 2009, 2:42 PM
\r?\n> I have good news, and I have
\r?\n> not-so-good news.
\r?\n> First some background; there's this site I've run for a
\r?\n> while called
\r?\n> http://www.wooljersey.com/
\r?\n> 2004. I had a server I
\r?\n> was using for some other stuff, and I already had the
\r?\n> Gallery software
\r?\n> [1] installed for another web site, so I stuck my
\r?\n> collection of
\r?\n> bicycle-related photos up there.[2] I was obsessing about
\r?\n> Masis and
\r?\n> Pogliaghis at the time, and I'd collected lots of pictures,
\r?\n> mostly from
\r?\n> other people. I also like to take photos while riding and
\r?\n> of bikes and so I
\r?\n> had a collection of my own photos as well. I offered
\r?\n> accounts to other
\r?\n> people and some folks like Aldo Ross found it useful. [3]
\r?\n> For fun, and to
\r?\n> get the bike photos off the other site, I got the domain
\r?\n> name "
\r?\n> wooljersey.com" set up Gallery there and transitioned the
\r?\n> bike photos to the
\r?\n> new site. [4] Amazingly, it was a useful resource, and
\r?\n> people in this
\r?\n> community really liked using it. Because so many of you are
\r?\n> of like minds
\r?\n> about which bikes and bike photos you like, wooljersey
\r?\n> became something of a
\r?\n> resource for classic lightweight bikes. It got big, and the
\r?\n> maintenance and
\r?\n> administration was a pain, and the software struggled to
\r?\n> keep up with the
\r?\n> visitors, user registrations and almost 50gb of pictures. I
\r?\n> lost the paying
\r?\n> customers that paid the monthly hosting bill, so I was
\r?\n> paying commercial
\r?\n> hosting rates ($125/month) for wooljersey and my personal
\r?\n> stuff. I never
\r?\n> made backups. The hard drive crashed about three weeks ago.
\r?\n> I lost
\r?\n> wooljersey along with some personal stuff (family photos,
\r?\n> personal email, my
\r?\n> blog, some genealogy stuff) and another set of files
\r?\n> related to another
\r?\n> hobby-community I'm part of. I did some research, figured
\r?\n> out who was the
\r?\n> best company to do the data recovery and sent the disk to
\r?\n> Drivesavers. [5] I
\r?\n> knew it might be expensive, depending on what they found
\r?\n> and how they
\r?\n> proceeded. I talked with my wife about it and we agreed to
\r?\n> go forward.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> Drivesavers worked on it for a long time. I got a status
\r?\n> call about a week
\r?\n> ago, telling me they had determined that the heads had
\r?\n> actually hit the
\r?\n> platters in the drive, that there was physical damage, that
\r?\n> they'd have to
\r?\n> disassemble the drive and work on it in a "clean room" and
\r?\n> that the work of
\r?\n> recovering the data would be slow. They said they'd need
\r?\n> more time, maybe a
\r?\n> week. I got an email to call them about my drive this past
\r?\n> Friday, and I
\r?\n> called them this morning.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> The good news: They were able to recover 95% of the files,
\r?\n> and the remaining
\r?\n> 5% they could recover, but they lost the directory
\r?\n> information for them.
\r?\n> Meaning that if I can figure out where they go, I can get
\r?\n> them back in a
\r?\n> usable state. This is good news! I'm amazed. The machine
\r?\n> was running linux,
\r?\n> and it used a filesystem called ext3, [6] which uses some
\r?\n> extra disk space
\r?\n> to keep a "journal", so that the journal can help recover
\r?\n> data if there's
\r?\n> any filesystem corruption. I think that is part of what
\r?\n> made this recovery
\r?\n> possible.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> More good news: Thanks to donations via paypal, I've
\r?\n> received $600 from you
\r?\n> all to help with the recovery. Thank you! That is amazing.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> The not-so-good news: The recovery bill is $2471.29, which
\r?\n> includes $129 for
\r?\n> a new, external drive on which the data will be delivered.
\r?\n> I have about $100
\r?\n> sitting in my "bike" bank account and $600 in paypal. I'm
\r?\n> looking at $1800
\r?\n> from our family finances. This is a tough sell. I'm
\r?\n> married, middle class,
\r?\n> two kids, mortgage; you can relate I bet. My wife and I are
\r?\n> going to talk
\r?\n> about it tonight. If we decide to proceed I'll probably
\r?\n> have wooljersey back
\r?\n> up again soon. I have gotten some offers to help with
\r?\n> hosting it, or to take
\r?\n> over hosting of it, and I will definitely choose one of
\r?\n> those paths. I'm
\r?\n> done paying $125/month for hosting it at xlhost.com. It
\r?\n> would return to the
\r?\n> community, and one or more of you would run it, and I'd
\r?\n> help as needed. If
\r?\n> we don't decide to proceed I'll return the donations and
\r?\n> we'll all say RIP
\r?\n> for wooljersey.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> There is very little that was on wooljersey that was
\r?\n> ultimately couldn't be
\r?\n> recreated. Most of the photos were of bicycles owned by
\r?\n> people here. They
\r?\n> could be re-uploaded to a new wooljersey, or flickr, or
\r?\n> some other photo
\r?\n> site. I suppose some were unique. What was unique about
\r?\n> wooljersey was the
\r?\n> collection itself, and its organization and cohesion. It
\r?\n> took years for all
\r?\n> of you to not only photograph and upload 50GB of photos,
\r?\n> but to categorize,
\r?\n> describe and comment the photos. Some of the photos were
\r?\n> ephemeral. Some
\r?\n> bikes have changed hands. Some contributors are no longer
\r?\n> alive. And then
\r?\n> there is the great gift that Aldo Ross provided; the
\r?\n> amazing catalog of
\r?\n> images he uploaded. I'm sure you're all familiar with his
\r?\n> photos, and "pic
\r?\n> of the day". Aldo, of all of wooljersey's photos your
\r?\n> albums are what
\r?\n> I miss most.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> So, I'll let you know how it goes. I've gotten a lot of
\r?\n> email off-list about
\r?\n> this, lots of advice, suggestions, etc. I had no plan for
\r?\n> wooljersey, it
\r?\n> just happened. I never thought it would get so big. I
\r?\n> honestly tried to
\r?\n> migrate some of my photos to flickr, where I have an
\r?\n> account, but the tool
\r?\n> [7] for transporting photos between the gallery software on
\r?\n> wooljersey and
\r?\n> flickr could not handle the giant database queries required
\r?\n> for wooljersey
\r?\n> and it failed. Assuming we go forward, the new maintainer
\r?\n> of wooljersey will
\r?\n> have to decide how best to proceed. The gallery software
\r?\n> project is still
\r?\n> full-steam-ahead at http://gallery.menalto.com/
\r?\n>
\r?\n> This is embarrassing and paying piles of money for the
\r?\n> recovery is foolish.
\r?\n> I'm mainly doing this for selfish reasons; because of the
\r?\n> family photos and
\r?\n> my blog.
\r?\n>
\r?\n> Morgan Fletcher
\r?\n> Oakland, CA USA
\r?\n>
\r?\n> [1] http://gallery.menalto.com/
\r?\n> [2]
\r?\n> http://search.bikelist.org/
\r?\n> [3]
\r?\n> http://search.bikelist.org/
\r?\n> [4]
\r?\n> http://search.bikelist.org/
\r?\n> [5] http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/
\r?\n> [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/
\r?\n> [7] http://gallery2flickr.sourceforge.net/