Percival and The Lost Homepage
Jun. 18th, 2003 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
percivalOnce upon a time, a university lecturer named Percival had a homepage at the department where she worked. This department did not have any backup policy in place. She lovingly tended that homepage, creating many a course web site, storing printable versions of papers, of her CV, of her dissertation, of her dissertation abstract, and some personal information there.
She never believed that this homepage would be taken down without telling her, and did not mirror the pages elsewhere. Call it blind faith, call it complacency, call it idiocy.
Little did she know ...
Last Friday, an e-mail reached her, asking for the location of her current homepage and her e-mail. Imagine her surprise and distress. She had left the department in March 2001, but surely they would have told her if they had decided to take her homepage down?
Today, she asked one of her friends at that department to enquire further. And lo and behold, her data is lost. The server on which her home directory, the one which held her web page, had been, had crashed. The data had never been backed up.
So she has to piece her academic home page back together, little by little, step by step. She has to reinvent her web presence.
She will take up the challenge.
Moral of the story: Never, ever, rely on your provider.
She never believed that this homepage would be taken down without telling her, and did not mirror the pages elsewhere. Call it blind faith, call it complacency, call it idiocy.
Little did she know ...
Last Friday, an e-mail reached her, asking for the location of her current homepage and her e-mail. Imagine her surprise and distress. She had left the department in March 2001, but surely they would have told her if they had decided to take her homepage down?
Today, she asked one of her friends at that department to enquire further. And lo and behold, her data is lost. The server on which her home directory, the one which held her web page, had been, had crashed. The data had never been backed up.
So she has to piece her academic home page back together, little by little, step by step. She has to reinvent her web presence.
She will take up the challenge.
Moral of the story: Never, ever, rely on your provider.
