IMPORTANT: Potential Image Server Loss

[J. Wilhelm]

I have bad news everyone. The Steamy Steampunk Buildings thread as well as many others in BG are at risk of losing a large number of pictures going back to 2009. It's related to the potential loss of Twitter, and it's image server, Twitpic. It will only affect a few people, and probably only me, but I've placed a very large number of pictures in Brassgoggles using that image server. The steamy buildings thread and the Icarus Meta Club will be the ones to suffer most, I think. I'm just letting you know, while I figure out a workaround 

You can read more details at this thread at the Engine Room.

http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,53306.0.html

[Hurricane Annie]

Twitter going down could be a blessing and a curse , a proverbial double edged sword . It would be sad to lose your fabulous photographic  contributions MR Wilhelm

[J. Wilhelm]

Twitter going down could be a blessing and a curse , a proverbial double edged sword . It would be sad to lose your fabulous photographic  contributions MR Wilhelm

I've decided that downloading the archive from Twitter is a waste of time. There will be gigabytes of photos that are garbage, and it'd take far too long to sift through them.  I may not have the time, anyway.

A more practical approach is to fix my desktop and use Mozilla desktop version to download the Brassgoggles pages of select topics in html format. The computer will download both pictures and text plus format, making it very fast to get an archive of the things that matter more.  I don't know if the way back archive helps because Brassgoggles doesn't host the pictures.  Instead, Mozilla will download the pictures. I will lose an awful lot of material, though.  It can't be helped. I can't do everything.

I do have hardcopy of all pictures, but sorting them will be very difficult without a reference page at hand.  The html format will do the parsing for me.

[RJBowman]

Could someone possibly write a script that would archive the images then edit the posts to point to a new image server?

[J. Wilhelm]

Could someone possibly write a script that would archive the images then edit the posts to point to a new image server?

That is such a good question, and it'd be very useful.

[von Corax]

Could someone possibly write a script that would archive the images then edit the posts to point to a new image server?

That is such a good question, and it'd be very useful.

It would certainly be challenging. Scraping the site would be slow and cumbersome. It might be possible to hit the database directly, but that would be a simple matter of programming.

[J. Wilhelm]

Well, I have good news regarding html page saving:

In my refurbished Linux computer, I can use the Chromium web browser to save entire pages, oldschool style, including pictures in a folder.

A picture heavy page from Brassgoggles like the Boombox Mk. IV, will be about 25 MB in size. Each page will have it's own folder.

The bad news is that I've already suffered a massive data loss. What I thought was just a backup for my three smartphones' pictures, turned out to be the *only* repository for my raw photos used for all my online activity, including Brassgoggles. That was no backup, that was the only archive. The only thing that remains of my 3 year Pandemic Era portfolio, is whatever I posted on social media. Brassgoggles, DeviantArt and Twitter are my archive now. Otherwise that information only remains in my brain

Luckily, items such as banking info, passwords, tax filings, etc. were saved to another SD card which is for now safe, and will be copied to a ½ TB drive that's already running in my Linux box . There's no hope for the corrupted card as it can't even be detected in Linux. Only Android recognizes the presence of the SD card.  The only way to recover relevant data is to copy the threads I'm interested in preserving.

[Sorontar]

:-(

Archiving digital data is always a problem. I backup the crucial work and personal files to a new stick/disk every year, updating it throughout the year. My hope is that I will always be able to find one archive that is working if I need it. I always presume that I shouldn't rely on any online service or my portable computerised telephonic device to store them.

My biggest problem is that I have had to change email address recently, so how do I archive the emails to my old address, especially since I would want to be able to search through them as a archive, not in an email program? I found a solution but I am always afraid that I will lose them.

What happened to the world of vanilla folders and photo albums?

Sorontar

[J. Wilhelm]

:-(

Archiving digital data is always a problem. I backup the crucial work and personal files to a new stick/disk every year, updating it throughout the year. My hope is that I will always be able to find one archive that is working if I need it. I always presume that I shouldn't rely on any online service or my portable computerised telephonic device to store them.

My biggest problem is that I have had to change email address recently, so how do I archive the emails to my old address, especially since I would want to be able to search through them as a archive, not in an email program? I found a solution but I am always afraid that I will lose them.

What happened to the world of vanilla folders and photo albums?

Sorontar

The problem is that I've had too many accidents involving SD cards/ USB flash disks. I also had another flash drive die on me with important information earlier this year, but luckily that was strictly backup for 8 year old data.

The fact is you can't trust flash memory, period. The last flash disc I lost a couple of days ago was only two years old. I suspect that when I dropped the phone, the drive lost power momentarily, leading to s corrupted file system. The phone responded by reformatting the Micro SD card as internal memory. Now I can't even detect the card on any operating system except Android, which says the card is empty. That was about 20 GB of data, or three years worth of pictures and documents.

In contrast, I still have DVD and CD RW and ROM discs ranging from 12-24 years ago that are perfectly safe and readable today. And zero information dating to 1994 stored on metal and glass hard disk drives has been lost!

[Sorontar]

We have cd backups of old insurance photos etc and I used to backup to them or other disks, but now 1) most of our desktop PCs don't have a DVD drive and 2) I am mainly working from a laptop. USB sticks are the most convenient option, especially when most of the data is work related and I need to use some of it on work machines when doing presentations etc.

Years ago, for one of my jobs we had nightly backups, weekly backups and monthly backups. The monthly backups were stored "offsite", which actually meant on racks in the basement carpark. If the place went up in fire, they were gone. Luckily that never happened when I was there, but I was always wondering how secure they were.

Sorontar

[J. Wilhelm]

The way I see it, long term storage is about reliability, not convenience. The traditional metal or glass plate hard drive still remains king when it comes to data retention. Short of killing the magnetic memory with high heat or crushing the glass plates to smithereens, some information will always be extractable. Optical disks made from plastic develop cracks over time and digital noise can cross a threshold after which data is unrecoverable. But solid state memories can be zapped away with just a spark, which is what I imagine happened here.

Hard drives and RAID will be around for a while, I'm assuming, and you can always FTP your files and directories between computers and smartphones. It's slow but if you adhere to small regular backups, technically you don't even need a optical disks, a removable flash disk or SD card at all. Use your own "personal cloud." But permanent storage should be on hard drives, I'm afraid.

For medium term temporary storage, optical disks are acceptable, I think. How long they'll last it's a matter of plastic degradation and ultraviolet light exposure, I think. But flash disks? Strictly temporary, as in very short term storage. I don't think that a flash disk can outlive an optical disk under normal handling situations.

[Sorontar]

Yeah, it is normally just for portability. At one stage, I was moving between three workplaces, so it made even more sense. I just start a new stick every year, so hopefully I have a 3-6 month backup and a 1-2 year old backup that work if disaster occurs.

But for family photos etc, we traditionally burn them to disk, rather than trust online social media services because 1) privacy 2) reliability 3) accessibility. Really, I would like them all to be physical photos, but hey, I even have a collection of slides I took in the 1980s.

Sorontar

[J. Wilhelm]

Your friendly reminder that we're more at risk now. Looks like Musk hasn't been paying rent and cloud servers. Twitter has a new CEO, but a couple of days ago Twitter had a major meltdown that looked like a giant DDoS attack. It looks like they were trying to block non signed-in people from extracting data from the posts, which resulted in broad denial of service globally. Later on Musk restricted the number of tweets anyone could see to a few hundred posts, and then they blamed the whole thing on bots "scraping" data from Twitter - a theory no one believes.

In the meantime they settled with Google, but presumably they had to reduce their bandwidth (IT definition of bandwidth), which is probably the real cause.

Anyhow, seeing as they have at least 4 lawsuits against them for non payment of counseling of and office rent, we need (meaning mostly "I") to prepare for image loss.

Unfortunately this month I have a very serious emergency with the potential loss of my job and a grave personal emergency involving my biological mother. I don't know if I'll have any time to save data should Twitter sink within the month, say before August.

My temporary fix was to use Chromium in Linux to save entire webpages as .html files with a matching folder including images (ie  .jpg) for each html page. Note neither Firefox nor Chrome will save the images, either in Linux or Android).

Critical threads include the Victorian Foods thread and the Steamy Buildings threads.  I've only taken snapshots of my build projects so far.

[J. Wilhelm]

Hello, denizens of Brassgoggles!  I'm getting closer to making a decision on the future over at least a portion of the pictures I've posted since 2009.

The situation at X, or as I call it, "Xchan" is getting exponentially worse at the direction of Musk.  Late posts made by the owner of the platform make me question whether I should start closing accounts right away, at least the older accounts that are not in use.

I won't go into details as to what Mr X did now, but it's sufficiently offensive that anyone staying on the platform could be regarded to be tangentially supporting a type of ideology that was flat out rejected by most of the world at the end of WWII. Mr. X is now legally lashing out at the news and media outfits that reported him, in a desperate effort to clear his name from what anyone with two brain cells can see is an affirmation to said ideology.

I feel I have no choice but to start shutting down my three (four?) accounts.  I will keep the main one open until I can back up the images, but the two (three?) older accounts that host my former Steampunk business images will be shut down ASAP, meaning the images about smartphone and tablet cases, computers, laptops and maybe some of the Mk.I Boombox images will disappear.  I don't know exactly when, but it's imminent.

I have backup photos of everything in "hard storage", but it'll take time for me to find them and host them somewhere else.  The newest account that holds most of the material posted since ~2013 will continue operating as I make more backups of my Brassgoggles pages, including the Steamy Building threads and Victorian Food Brands thread. All of that is in the newest account.

It's more tractable to do it this way, as my former Steampunk business hasn't been alive for almost a decade, it's hard to track my older posts on BG and no one talks about them anyway.

[selectedgrub]

Sad news indeed.
Reality is in 5 years no one will be looking at them anyway.

[J. Wilhelm]

Sad news indeed.
Reality is in 5 years no one will be looking at them anyway.

Why 5 years?  Arguably no one is looking at them now (I'm talking about the early 2010s Era photos.  Itwas before I started posting on history of my Steampunk characters and writing. Their value is purely archival. Also, there's a difference between no one looking at them and no one commenting on them; It's been a very long time since I learned I don't get many comments on my threads. I don't really mind. People have been very nice to me at Brassgoggles when I was in severe distress many years ago.

[J. Wilhelm]

Ladies and Gentlemen: the hour is nigh. Things are rolling down the hill on Xitter, pardon me, "X," and sustaing this account will be impossible. This week we had another major migration out of X after the political happenings in America.  This time the migration is toward BlueSky.

Because X and the new government will be intertwined by way of Elon Musk and his new Ministry of Silly Walks, many people opposed to Musk have opted to leave for good. At first earlier this year before elections, it was mostly British people, but now it's Americans as of last week. The other reason is that X will claim intellectual ownership of ALL material and subject to be used to train GROK AI very soon. It's already been announced,  so most artists are leaving the platform as we speak.

I have started a new account at BlueSky and I have an existing account at Mastodon.  I don't know which system will be a better host, but I have a feeling that the server (i.e. "instance") I chose last year in the Mastodon Fediverse may not be amicable to handle too many pictures without generating a conflict with the server owners. I simply don't know, because it's a smaller server (https//spacey.space).  On the other hand BlueSky is still a federated style system much like Mastodon, but it's structure and moderation method are most similar to Twitter and they have a large central server that's taking the bulk of the migration (Therefore I'm going to try to migrate the pictures to BlueSky.

I'm going to perform a test below to see for how long I can hot link a picture to BlueSky, without it getting deleted.

#THIS IS A TEST
Source Image: 2048x921 pixels, 196.3 KiB

BlueSky (#.bsky.social)

Image reduced to 55.1 KiB 885 x 398 pixels. Cannot be zoomed. can't be dowloaded at all

The URL for the BlueSky image is a nightmare though:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:bioayqm3lkufyorffadg55la/bafkreicozla7ldrodbkj6xb6wdbej6shnbxxdoee2hx43g3r45tge3qkvi@jpeg

Mastodon (spacey.space)

Image display reduced to 31.87 KiB but zoomable and downloadable at 183.66 KB 2048 x 921
This URL isn't much better. Perhaps a bit more tractable:

https://cdn.masto.host/spaceyspace/media_attachments/files/113/495/572/606/110/479/original/680f71dea0bad2a6.jpeg

Let's see how long these hot links last.

Xitter

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcjLxBqXUAAZ9r2?format=jpg&name=large

Image reduced on display to 60%, but zoomable and downloadable at 193.6 KiB (img + metadata?) and 2048 x 921 pixels

Test Start time: November 16 7:00 PM United States Central Standard Time =
November 17 1:00 AM Coordinated Universal Time

[J. Wilhelm]

Well, it looks like Mastodon is holding up, and so is Bluesky. I'm a little disappointed on the quality of the BlueSky pictures though.  It's barely noticeable, but they look blurry.

One strategy is for me to post on both BlueSky and Mastodon, using the Mastodon pictures for BG, and socialize using the BlueSky posts. If the Mastodon server, spacey.space objects (it's a small European based server), then I'll use the BlueSky pictures as backup.

Honestly I can't post on Twitter anymore. After spending two minutes on X yesterday, I deleted my daily posts after 1/2 hour.  It was that bad. It's getting exponentially worse by the week. Even if you avoid seeing the feed full of garbage, all the cornucopia of ads you can see now are political, or... let's say impotence aids and related medication.  It's clear advertisement now excludes most serious companies and international organizations, including government entities. Basically, X has turned itself into a public toilet.


I want to delete the account, but for as long as I have a portfolio there, I'll have to keep it open.  Unless I lose my patience and just nuke it.