“American Digest” Backup
As you may recall, I had plans to occasionally re-post some of Gerard’s work (those essays that Neo didn’t place in Book 1 and maybe Book 2). To do so, required making copies of those essays. Rather than go through 20 years or so of writings and individually copy those I had possible interest in, I got a web backup application and dedicated a computer to spend the 38 hours it took to copy the AD site. (others – ghostsniper for sure – did so as well).
Being unfortunately familiar with computers and their evil ways, I double-checked the backup when the download was complete.
Ah-h-h … just what I was looking for. So I made copies and backed the backups onto separate hard drives.
I should have known better.
Well, when AD went dark, there was a Gerard post I was going to put up.
So I whipped out the backed-up copy and … digital dust. Nothing much was in the backup copy. For some un-Godly reason, the backup software made a backup that was dependent on the original site.
I do NOT trust software. I do believe in Murphy’s Law – I trust any piece of software to give me problems at unexpected times.
I saw a meme today that defined what happened. Being a bit of a physicist myself, it rang true …
Are your original downloaded files useable?
Are you saying that when you copied the original downloaded files to another HD something changed in the files to make them unuseable?
I haven’t moved the original downloaded files yet, they are still where they landed when down loaded. I need to move them into long term storage but your message has me concerned.
Is there a way to “bulk print” all of the html files to pdf’s?
No, the files of the original backup I had were linked to AD’s web site. When that site went down, so did the backed-up files except for bits and pieces. I think I mentioned this back when AD went down. Check out the Apr 12 post. Maybe yours are OK. I didn’t delete anything in case I didn’t try to recover the files properly.
I don’t know of a way to bulk print HTML to PDF – unless you wanted to print the PDF as HTML; even then, you’d probably have to have the HTML as a single file. The page sizing and formatting would be different so such an effort wouldn’t be trivial … not that there may not be a method I’m not aware of.
Didn’t work. I opened the html file titled “1st-confirmation-that-the-virus-was-a-deliberate-ccp-bio-warfare-attack-on-the-usa”/feed/index.htm, and hit ctrl/p and it showed 37 pages. Most of the pages were blank but a few had the text of that post, but no graphics. Kinda hard to explain.
Obviously what has happened was the files I downloaded were some how dependent upon access to the original site. What a fukken drag. I’ll continue to hang onto the massive files, for the text content. I’m pissed I was deceived like that.
Almost sounds like a DVD disc rot phenomenon.
As one other commenter mentioned, Wayback Machine has Gerard’s posts.
Yes, thank you for the reminder. The point of this post was the Murphys Law effect on backups and the related meme.