Allchiara Dot com

Hey! Hi!

I was going to wait until things were prettier around here, or until I could figure out how to make the archives not kill my soul, or until I’d gone through everything and assigned categories and fixed the links and so on and so forth…but I am so tired of managing this journal, of cutting and pasting and messing around with trying to figure out why some of the dates are off, and why I can’t seem to figure out how to upload a nice theme, and why the hell I use so many italics when I write…I have had to go through and change all the old diary-x coding to regular HTML and KILL ME NOW. So I’m sorry that it is weird and un-intuitive around here, and I’m sorry that I probably have not linked to your site even though I love you so much, and I’m sorry that if you go through the archives and try to link you’ll get the hilarious We Will Rebuild It page, like, no thanks, dude, I’ve already been through enough heartbreak dealing with your deciding not to do backups, thanks.

For those of you that don’t know, a couple of weeks ago diary-x just…disappeared. Server something hard drive failure something else possibly unrecoverable the other thing. Turns out the guy who was running it just decided, over a year ago, to stop doing backups, and didn’t tell anyone, and so…after spamming all the diary-x users with a request for money to help him to buy a new laptop…he asked for more money to send the drive to a drive recovery thingy place. It was unclear as to whether any of us would get anything back.

I started this journal the last week of 2001 and I couldn’t even think very much about what losing all those entries would mean to me. I couldn’t even think about it. I did the mental equivalent of crossing my fingers and whistling, and I told people, when they asked me what was up, that I was pretty sure it would be recoverable, even though I had no idea if that was really true or not. I knew I had made my own backup at some point…diary-x did offer that option, thank goodness, and it was pure blind stupid luck that I happened to do it when I did, over a year ago. I found the backup files on my own hard drive and felt a little better about the whole thing, especially when I realized that I had most of the Word originals I’d written since the backup (in April of 2005) on that same hard drive. It was a relief like you can’t believe to know that at least all the stuff was there, even if I didn’t know what to do with it or how to make it that other people could, you know, read it.

I messed around with other free sites and even tried to set up a wordpress.com site, but the whole task of bringing everything over just was sort of sapping and I began to wonder, a little, if maybe this was a sign from above that I should just forget the whole thing. Well, you know. I still wanted to write, but I’d been wondering for a while what the hell I was doing with my journal and how long I should keep it up. And I had no idea how to set up my own domain or how to get the old archives onto a new journal, and it was all very difficult and frustrating and I tried not to think about it too much. I hoped, secretly, that diary-x would come back magically…not that I wanted to keep using it, of course, but I thought it would be easier to transport an entire journal, with everything ordered correctly and dated and everything, than to have to piece together a new one.

Last weekend I learned that the drive was, in fact, unrecoverable, and that everything…had been lost. I was so glad that I’d saved my own archives that at first I couldn’t really feel anything else but that I’d dodged a bullet somehow. Then I started thinking about how I’d feel if I, with absolutely no understanding of how the internet works, with a secret belief that hamsters make my laptop run, had trusted a service with all my work. People have been saying, about the whole drive failure thing, that you get what you pay for when you use a free service, that you can’t expect that things won’t go wrong and that mistakes won’t be made. I think to some extent that’s true. I also think that the reason I was using diary-x was because I didn’t understand about the mistakes that could be made. I wish that I’d educated myself more about how to protect my work, and that the person who ran diary-x had made his decisions about how he ran the site more transparent. I do know that if I had been aware that he wasn’t doing backups that I’d have been more assiduous about doing my own, and it really only is blind stupid luck that I did when I did, and that I got burned good and early about at least saving my entries in Word before posting them. I want to take responsibility for my own work and what I do with it but I can’t help feeling a little bamboozled by Stephen Deken’s decisions…and I can’t begin to comprehend how I’d feel if I actually had lost everything.

Enter serendipity in the form of my housemate Matt, who, unbeknownst to me, happens to be some sort of crazy genius. I knew that he was in charge of the wireless in our house but I didn’t know that he would make some clicky-clicky noises on my laptop and then on his machine and that everything I’d backed up would appear, whole if not wholly perfect, up on the new site. My same blind stupid luck, working again. Maybe it’s not so big a deal to you to be able to have things work out just right, but to me it’s a huge gift and one for which I am not nearly done being grateful.

I wrote here that it felt like cutting off a limb, and that was before I went through a bunch of my early archives to fix links and stuff like that. I’ve spent a lot of time this past week reading through old entries and sighing and cringing and rolling my eyes at myself and feeling a little sniffly. I don’t usually read through the archives unless I need to link something specific, and so I’d forgotten how much everything’s changed since the last week of 2001. It felt like a different person was writing back then; I hardly recognize her. Reading through my paper journal (another thing I hardly ever do, mostly because it’s really boring) doesn’t feel the same way, doesn’t give me the context somehow. I can’t explain it, what it’s like to read through my recent history and remember everything…what I was writing about, and what I wasn’t writing about. I don’t understand people who don’t record their lives…how do you remember what you were like when you were twenty-seven and too old to say “Oh, I don’t know!” when people asked you what you wanted to do in your life, and too young to be going through a midlife crisis? How do you know how much you’ve changed since then, what you were thinking when you thought your heart might break and that you’d go crazy from grief, what you were thinking when you decided maybe you wouldn’t after all. I don’t have a very good memory, so I have to write it all down. I’m discovering this week as I read through everything that the writing itself is an integral part of the experience and memory now. At some point I started writing the entries in my head, sometimes even as I was doing the thing I was going to write about, and now the entries themselves are the official versions of the things I do. Losing them would have been less like losing a limb than losing a cranial lobe. It’s ridiculous and melodramatic to say that I would be a different person if I hadn’t written those entries for all those years, but my being ridiculous and melodramatic is no news to long time readers so I will say it anyway and be glad I can do so in a place where you guys can read about it.

I’m going to keep writing, for a while at least, and I’m going to do it at my new (sort of silly but slightly awesome) domain name, and I’m going to make it look pretty as soon as I can, and I’m going to make the links work and try to figure out about the lost pictures and make it a little less of a nightmare to navigate. It’s a little rough around the edges but I don’t care because I am so happy to be writing online again. It’s only been a couple of weeks of not writing regularly, but it was enough for me to feel sort of deaf and mute. I’m so happy to have my voice back. I’m so happy you feel like listening.


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15 responses to “Allchiara Dot com”

  1. Jem Avatar

    Hi! Welcome back! :) Once you figure out how to change the site, can you let me know how? I am using the same template as you and I cannot figure out how to change it. Gah.

  2. Chelsea Avatar

    I’m using Serendipity now, too. I don’t like how it looks yet, but at least it’s there, and not asking me for money, and I can see the backups myownself. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who stores half my brain in my journal.

  3. Peter Boothe Avatar

    Woo! All the time!

    And with an RSS feed now!

  4. Amalah Avatar

    So your trials prompted me to THINK about backing up my own site, and then today, when my work computer suffered “massive hard drive failure” and I almost lost four years’ worth of photos and writings, I decided that maybe it was time to get cracking with the backing up for real. Lord.

    So glad you’re back and that you didn’t lose everything. I…cannot even imagine what that would feel like.

  5. Coleen Avatar

    Hooray, you have returned!

    (By the way, I tried leaving this earler yesterday, but it wouldn’t accept my comment. Dekenic payback?)

  6. Kate Avatar

    To be completely frank, it’s really refreshing to hear your anger at Stephen Deken, mostly because I keep reading comments – on the diary-x livejournal community for example – where people feel SORRY for Deken and offer him SYMPATHY.

    Whereas I feel like any and every conversation about Deken can be ended with a, “HE HADN’T BACKED UP ANYTHING SINCE 2004” and then maybe you could throw in an additional “TWO THOUSAND AND FOUR” in there.

    At any rate, I’m so glad you didn’t lose everything, and I’m glad you’re writing again.

  7. Anne A. Avatar
    Anne A.

    Eeeeeee! This rocks! Good for you!

  8. Jules Avatar
    Jules

    Yay, welcome back!!! I panicked when you disappeared and reappeared and disappeared again and then hurrah! I found you again. I hope you like your new home enough to stay – I think it is pretty, by the way, and the domain name is indeed awesome – I have missed my fix of cupcakes, bellydance, TopSecretPlans, cephalopods and everything.

  9. Nomie Avatar

    I am so glad that you’re alive and around! Stupidly, after the Diary-X failure, I didn’t go poking around to see if you still existed. But you do! Hurray! Also, I’ve friended your LJ, which I hope is okay.

    And I’m going to go back up my journal right now.

  10. Dorrie Avatar
    Dorrie

    Dearest….
    Glad to see you back up on my screen…I was sad, then I was happy, then I was sad, now I am happy again! No one cares what your site looks like, dude, just put the words there.

  11. Sundry Avatar

    It’s Chiara with COMMENTS, ROCK! I hope the forthcoming design involves both tentacles and kiwifruit.

  12. Josh Avatar

    Yay! You’re back!!!

    Gosh, I’ve missed you.

  13. Renee Avatar
    Renee

    I’ve missed you and your wonderful words. I was afraid you were going to NZ without us. Welcome back!

  14. Chiara Avatar
    Chiara

    Aw, babies. You are so sweet to me. It’s really weird to have comments but really cool to get such nice ones. That said, everyone go back up your files RIGHT THIS SECOND, okay?

  15. Sylvia Avatar
    Sylvia

    Congratulations on the new site. It looks absolutely beautiful! And I’m so very glad that you didn’t give up on keeping this journal. You are a writer. (And I’m a reader!)