Another Day In The Journal Of Fandom History Preservation

Dear Diary, my DVD recorder  died this weekend, in the middle of archiving old Betamax songvids on videotape. “No problem’, I thought, “I’ll get a new one.” But alas they no longer manufacture DVD recorders in the US, so we had to find a used one on eBay (and hope it works).

Then one of my external  backup drives began giving me the click clack whir of death. Trips to the freezer only have made it worse. The drive housed static projects and was only partially backed up (in fact I no longer recall all the projects it housed, they were that static.)  In the process of trying to recover some of these older projects from an eMac, I reformatted my last spare external drive to FAT32 so it could be read by said eMac.  Now the spare drive cannot be recognized on any OS - Mac, PC or Linux. Reformatting it back to NTSF produced the same results. Something about a missing partition……?

We won’t know how many projects were lost until my partner brings home the “offsite” backup drive from work. Yes, with our bandwith limits, we have to resort to the sneakernet.

So I leave you with this:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

—Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57. ISBN 0-13-166836-6.

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