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kitsuneheart posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
amplificathon Kind of piggy-backing on Paraka, here, but this has been a subject on my mind, recently.
I'm just going to start by saying this: Back up your shit. Back it up. Do it, NOW. Do it to the cloud, and then buy an external drive and back up to that, as well. Store the external drive somewhere outside your house (a friend's house, your car, whatever). Heck, if your personal file collection is small enough, you can probably keep it all on a keychain flash drive. If you're a packrat, like me, your hard drive will still be no bigger than a book. Go do it. Now.
There's plenty of free options for smaller file collections. I personally recommend Google Drive (15GB) or DropBox (2GB, but there's guides online on how to get more space, so it's pretty easy to get over 10GB without paying), because they do the backups automatically. This is the BARE MINIMUM you should be doing, people. Never freak out because your computer died in the middle of writing or drawing or recording. Fix it or replace it, and download your cloud backup. If you've got a lot of stuff, then go find a service which will let you store more.
Two years ago, I bit the bullet and bought a DropBox Pro account. I am so glad I did, because, a few months later, my laptop crashed. Rather than freaking out and trying to recover old files, I just got my new laptop, installed DropBox, and let it download my backups. Within two days, I was back to normal. All my music, photos, my writing, my podfic. Safe. If I'd already had that external hard drive backup I recommend, I'd have been fixed up even faster. There are lots of services you can consider, but if you can find yourself with the cash to spare, investing in an automatic cloud backup service like DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. is a great investment for any creator.
I don't fully understand what happened with Jinjurly's site, but it looks like there were not enough backups. One got corrupted in the website transfer, and another...I dunno. We were told back in July that the main backup was in hand and the archive would be back to normal over the weekend, but that never happened. Did Jinjurly lie about that backup's existence? Was it also bad? Did it get lost? Did she (and I am being serious here) die on us? I've been keeping a backup of all the current Jinjurly files on my laptop and that external drive, just in case this were all to happen again, but, at this point...I don't think that another corrupt file system is what's going to kill the archive.
There's been no communication with archive higher-ups since July. And, when I said I was being serious about Jinjurly maybe passing, I was being 100% serious. For all intents and purposes, she's...gone. No longer with us. I hope that she's just moved on in her interests, is too busy with life, but we just don't know.
The Jinurly.com domain expires in September. If nothing has changed by mid-August, I'll bring this up with other main archive people (Paraka most definitely) on how to proceed. I think someone in the podfic community needs to buy it up, but what to do with it, how to proceed...I dunno. A redirect? A clone of the original site? A whole new home for podficcers? I just don't know. And I'm not even sure if it's necessary, anymore.
A few weeks ago, I decided to finally check the podfic tag on AO3, and I found that only 1/3rd, possibly less, of podfics are being posted here to Amplificathon. It's not a hub, anymore. Oh, I'm looking forward to the annual Amplificathon challenge posts, but Dreamwidth? Jinjurly? They're not the place to go, anymore. You can get some exposure, sure, but that's about it.
At the same time, don't put all your faith in the AO3. I love it dearly. I support it extensively. I'm one of those people with two coffee cups and other goodies, and my husband's employer matches what I contribute (lol, Google helps host your fanfic). The OTW is the beneficiary on my Amazon Smile setup. I know not everyone can give to the OTW as freely, but I DO encourage all of you that use Amazon to set up that Smile account to help the OTW, and to also install whatever extension for your browser that automatically redirects you to smile.amazon when you're shopping (SmileAlways for Chrome, Smile Redirect for Firefox). It costs you nothing, and if enough people do it, it will really help the OTW out.
But I do not think the Archive of Our Own will last forever. I live walking distance to the Yahoo campus, and in the time I've been here, it's gone from packed parking lots to a skeleton crew, with even grimmer news circling around the investors. Websites, even for-profit sites, just...fail. It happens all the time.
So, when I love a fanfic, I go back to the top of the page and download it as an epub. I keep it, just like I've always kept all the podfic I listen to. A significant number of files recovered to the archive in Paraka's efforts are from my own computer, used as a last resort after original links failed and readers either didn't respond or said they hadn't kept their old work. I keep these things because I know, someday, they will be gone, and I will want them. To listen to or read again, or to give to a friend who will love them as much as I did.
I adore Paraka so much for what she has done in hosting podfics. She has accomplished far, FAR more than I did on the archive recovery, and she's still trying. But, if you are a creator or a lover of a work, keep your own backups. Don't upload to Paraka and then delete from your own computer. Keep your creations close. Hope that you never had to use those backups again, but be prepared to, if the time comes.
Go back up your stuff. Back up the stuff you love. You'll thank me, someday.
I'm just going to start by saying this: Back up your shit. Back it up. Do it, NOW. Do it to the cloud, and then buy an external drive and back up to that, as well. Store the external drive somewhere outside your house (a friend's house, your car, whatever). Heck, if your personal file collection is small enough, you can probably keep it all on a keychain flash drive. If you're a packrat, like me, your hard drive will still be no bigger than a book. Go do it. Now.
There's plenty of free options for smaller file collections. I personally recommend Google Drive (15GB) or DropBox (2GB, but there's guides online on how to get more space, so it's pretty easy to get over 10GB without paying), because they do the backups automatically. This is the BARE MINIMUM you should be doing, people. Never freak out because your computer died in the middle of writing or drawing or recording. Fix it or replace it, and download your cloud backup. If you've got a lot of stuff, then go find a service which will let you store more.
Two years ago, I bit the bullet and bought a DropBox Pro account. I am so glad I did, because, a few months later, my laptop crashed. Rather than freaking out and trying to recover old files, I just got my new laptop, installed DropBox, and let it download my backups. Within two days, I was back to normal. All my music, photos, my writing, my podfic. Safe. If I'd already had that external hard drive backup I recommend, I'd have been fixed up even faster. There are lots of services you can consider, but if you can find yourself with the cash to spare, investing in an automatic cloud backup service like DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. is a great investment for any creator.
I don't fully understand what happened with Jinjurly's site, but it looks like there were not enough backups. One got corrupted in the website transfer, and another...I dunno. We were told back in July that the main backup was in hand and the archive would be back to normal over the weekend, but that never happened. Did Jinjurly lie about that backup's existence? Was it also bad? Did it get lost? Did she (and I am being serious here) die on us? I've been keeping a backup of all the current Jinjurly files on my laptop and that external drive, just in case this were all to happen again, but, at this point...I don't think that another corrupt file system is what's going to kill the archive.
There's been no communication with archive higher-ups since July. And, when I said I was being serious about Jinjurly maybe passing, I was being 100% serious. For all intents and purposes, she's...gone. No longer with us. I hope that she's just moved on in her interests, is too busy with life, but we just don't know.
The Jinurly.com domain expires in September. If nothing has changed by mid-August, I'll bring this up with other main archive people (Paraka most definitely) on how to proceed. I think someone in the podfic community needs to buy it up, but what to do with it, how to proceed...I dunno. A redirect? A clone of the original site? A whole new home for podficcers? I just don't know. And I'm not even sure if it's necessary, anymore.
A few weeks ago, I decided to finally check the podfic tag on AO3, and I found that only 1/3rd, possibly less, of podfics are being posted here to Amplificathon. It's not a hub, anymore. Oh, I'm looking forward to the annual Amplificathon challenge posts, but Dreamwidth? Jinjurly? They're not the place to go, anymore. You can get some exposure, sure, but that's about it.
At the same time, don't put all your faith in the AO3. I love it dearly. I support it extensively. I'm one of those people with two coffee cups and other goodies, and my husband's employer matches what I contribute (lol, Google helps host your fanfic). The OTW is the beneficiary on my Amazon Smile setup. I know not everyone can give to the OTW as freely, but I DO encourage all of you that use Amazon to set up that Smile account to help the OTW, and to also install whatever extension for your browser that automatically redirects you to smile.amazon when you're shopping (SmileAlways for Chrome, Smile Redirect for Firefox). It costs you nothing, and if enough people do it, it will really help the OTW out.
But I do not think the Archive of Our Own will last forever. I live walking distance to the Yahoo campus, and in the time I've been here, it's gone from packed parking lots to a skeleton crew, with even grimmer news circling around the investors. Websites, even for-profit sites, just...fail. It happens all the time.
So, when I love a fanfic, I go back to the top of the page and download it as an epub. I keep it, just like I've always kept all the podfic I listen to. A significant number of files recovered to the archive in Paraka's efforts are from my own computer, used as a last resort after original links failed and readers either didn't respond or said they hadn't kept their old work. I keep these things because I know, someday, they will be gone, and I will want them. To listen to or read again, or to give to a friend who will love them as much as I did.
I adore Paraka so much for what she has done in hosting podfics. She has accomplished far, FAR more than I did on the archive recovery, and she's still trying. But, if you are a creator or a lover of a work, keep your own backups. Don't upload to Paraka and then delete from your own computer. Keep your creations close. Hope that you never had to use those backups again, but be prepared to, if the time comes.
Go back up your stuff. Back up the stuff you love. You'll thank me, someday.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-02-25 12:15 am (UTC)I highly doubt she'll let the domain name lapse (though it's of course a good idea to keep an eye on those things and plan for just-in-case), if only because the archive is not the only thing on the domain, she also has her personal website on there.
That said, a few years ago, growing frustrated with the outdated design of the AA I started poking around for software options that might be suitable for a better sort of podfic archive and I hope to start working on putting that research into action soon (I planned on doing this last year actually, but then my health took a serious nose dive and it's been limiting what I can do, and I'll admit, the project is such a big one I'm kind of intimidated by it) but hopefully we will eventually have an alternative podfic archive, and I'm working on ways of setting it up, probably as a not-for-profit so it's not a single owner with a single point of fail like we have with the AA. That way if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, the site could still go on.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-02-25 12:22 am (UTC)I did a little digging and found what I believe to be her personal twitter account, which is still active. It's a shame if she has moved on without mentioning it to anyone. The people still running the show behind the scenes deserve better. Given the choice between finding audiofic on AA or AO3, I prefer AA every time.
Do you know if any of the main archive people have access to any donated money to pay for the domain & hosting, assuming donations are still coming in?
(no subject)
Date: 2017-02-25 12:50 am (UTC)I'm pretty sure jinjurly is the only one with access to the billing options (if anyone else had access, they could also talk to support about our space issue), which would be needed to renew things, but I wouldn't really worry about donated money, as far as I know there was never very much donated. There were always a people willing to donate if there was a need, but jinjurly was pretty honest about there being no great need for it.
I really don't think we're dealing with any sort of misappropriation of funds here. As much as I wish jinjurly were handling this differently, I still feel I know and trust her enough to know she wouldn't swindle fandom (she's only ever given to fandom over and over and over again). I'm 99.9% sure she has invested way more money into running the archive than she ever got through donations (though she's never shared actual financials with me).
(no subject)
Date: 2017-02-25 01:29 am (UTC)I'm kind of curious about what the OTW might be able to do. Audio takes more bandwidth than text, obviously, but there was never anywhere near so much podfic as fanfic. Overall, AO3 is a great site, and serves podficcers pretty well, so far.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-02-25 03:50 pm (UTC)Honestly? Nothing.
You're welcome to try, but they're not going to be able to do anything for us. There have been podficcers on the OTW board (including jinjurly herself and tinypinkmouse currently) for probably half its run and it hasn't made AO3 better for podficcers. I once asked AO3 to fix a simple error that was screwing things up for podficcers, among others, (an error) and it took them over a year to implement the code fix, even though someone stepped up to code the fix pretty quickly, because they prioritized our problem so low.
One of the major new features that was supposed to be implemented in version 0.9 of AO3 (the version we're currently on) was adding new work types to the archive, so you can specify if a work is written, audio, video, visual art, ect. This priority was set in 2013 and was "an essential part of one of our major priorities" and we still don't have it and when I spoke to tinypinkmouse about it it didn't sound all that close either. And they're certainly not anywhere close to hosting media because they're not willing to host only podfic, they'd want to open up to all media, such as images and vids as well and that's a lot of hosting (heck, I've been looking at costs for properly hosting everyone's podfic - what jinjurly and I use is pretty much at capacity right now and doesn't have much more room to grow - and the next step up is quite a step up in price, X10 at least).
(no subject)
Date: 2017-02-25 01:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-02-25 02:20 am (UTC)Unfortunately since it was a private website though, all the finances went through jinjurly as far as I know, though I'm actually not worried about things expiring in September.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-03-02 10:23 am (UTC)Real talk? I think that these comments are out of line. I spoke with Jinjurly recently and she still loves podfic fandom and plans to return. She's simply been ill. The current situation is by no means ideal, but that doesn't mean you can throw wild accusations with nothing to back them up.
Imagine, for a moment, that you had years' worth of other people's files - and yours - go missing on you. Then you had hundreds of people asking you for updates, while you were in no state to handle them. You might need to step away from the situation to HEAL YOURSELF before addressing anyone else.
If the point of this post was "back up your files," then fine. But don't talk trash on someone else just because you may not understand the thought behind their actions.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-05-04 05:44 am (UTC)& OP, did you go with Dropbpx Pro over their business version for any reason? I keep getting their business one advertised to me lately since I'm getting close to the limit and have been pondering upgrading as well.