The Woes of the Web - Epilogue

After about a week, I've got my website restored to roughly what it was before my "err, didn't mean to delete that" incident.  I took the opportunity to add a few improvements.  You'll notice some visual tweaks such as frames around images, and a snazzy tag cloud at the bottom (click a keyword to see all related posts - for instance, all artwork done on blue colourfix paper).  Now that it's been a week since the latest Wordpress upgrade, programmers have also released updates for many of the broken features ("plugins").  In particular, one plugin allows me to embed Flickr hosted images into any post or page as a Flash gallery.  If you look at my header navigation menu, you'll see 'Photography' and 'Paper' links - click one to see an example. A subtle implication of this is that many of my images are now hosted on Flickr - so if I accidently delete a folder in my website, they still exist.

Earlier this year my laptop's hard drive became corrupted and needed to be reformatted. As most of my artwork scans resided on my hard drive, they were lost in the reformatting. In this case, though, I had copies on my website, so I was able to download them back to my hard drive.

The thing I've learned from all of this is, now that artwork has moved from the realm of slides to scans, it's worth noting that it is remarkably easy to destroy or otherwise lose digital files. It's good practice to have at least one backup - either hosted offline on a service like Flickr, or burned to a DVD.  I'm becoming increasing fond of offline backups.  Paired together with my own copies, it should provide a good failsafe for lost files.