Fremantle
· Internet Archive · archiving · backups ·
For another reason to self-host your own material before putting it anywhere else, the Internet Archive somehow deleted my user account and all of its comments and other things:
Due to an admin error we mistakenly deleted your account. We did not remove or delete any uploaded materials. Reviews, forum posts and "My Web Archive" cannot be restored at this time. […] Your items should be automatically relinked. Unfortunately any reviews, forum posts or Web Archive you had cannot be restored.
(That in an email reply to me asking what'd happend.)
I'm glad that none of the actual archive items were lost (that's the IA's meaning in life, so I'd be very surprised if an 'admin error' could do much damage there), but did momentarily leave me feeling a bit sad. However, it sort of makes sense — the forums and reviews systems have never felt like very high priorities to the IA, and that's always been fine by me. I don't post much on the forums, and although have often used the reviews system as a way of backlinking to places like Wikimedia Commons it doesn't massively matter if they're gone.
This does leave me feeling happy that I'm bothering with self-hosting my own photos and family archives. I have many times thought that I should give up doing so, and just rely on Flickr, Commons, and IA. It really comes down to the difference in risk between me stuffing up my system and destroying my data, and anyone else doing that. I used to think that it clearly fell on the side of me being a tinkerer and therefore a breaker — but I guess anyone can make mistakes.
I'll carry on uploading wiki dumps to the IA, that's for sure.