(no subject)

NOW I'm missing entries and comments, discussions that took place on my journal recently that were important to me. This is, to me, far worse than the loss of my style info.

Notably, the discussion where several of you told me where to find archive tools is missing. That entry and all of the discussion is gone. I will have to beg you to please tell me again where to find those tools.

I'm afraid to look through my memories to see how many of my old entries might be mising.

LJ is offering people on Chef-sub-8 a month of free time. Big whoop -- what good is free paid time, when there's no guarantee that data will be retained?

LJ gets no more of my money, until I see sustained proof that stability issues like this have been fixed.

Edit. The "lost entry restoration tool" says this: "It seems that all of your entries are in order. If you are experiencing any difficulties with your account, please visit our support center."

No, they most certainly are NOT in order. This is totally unacceptable.

Edit. The LJ Backup tool does not work on this computer, for some reason. I suppose I'll try rebooting and seeing if that works.

I'd wait until tomorrow, because I'm literally sickened over my frustration with this, but I should try to do the backup while my entries are still here.

I'm really hurting over this.

Unless yet another new technical problem develops (which I'm expecting), this is the last time you'll hear me grumble about LJ. Largely because I won't be around much.

As it states in the second response to my technical support request, the two entries that are missing are gone for good.
http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=307277

I'm glad that neither of them were extremely important, lengthy posts like this or this or this. I haven't always kept a backup copy, even of important posts, because I was paying LiveJournal to store this information for me, and to provide simultaneously a forum where I could get intelligent feedback on my thoughts and research and ideas as it progressed.

Even still, one of them was a very important sentiment that is now gone.

In the meantime, I will be trying the archive tools or going through the memories and saving my entries to hard drive, and will be developing a system to organize my ongoing thoughts on my hard drive and on some sort of backup -- either floppy disk or CD-R (which would require purchasing a new CD burner to replace the one in my PC that has crapped out).

For interaction I will probably return to Beliefnet. I might look into DeadJournal or UJournal or BlogSpot; whatever I do I will post here. Or I might start giving a lot more attention to Yahoogroups again. I may decide to CC important posts here, but I am terribly afraid of losing any good discussion that takes place. Losing a post like the ones linked to above and the discussion that followed would be heartbreaking.

Still, I doubt I will abandon LJ just yet, as I really do love this site. I just can't stand the ongoing technical issues -- the "unknown journal" message I still get routinely when posting comments, and so on.

PS. If you have commented on a post of mine recently, and the comment is now missing, as many of them are, it was not me who deleted it.

Edit 7/12/2004 10:05AM. This morning, I'm feeling very "locked in" here. It's difficult to overstate how important LJ has become in my life, which sounds kind of weird and obsessive, but it has truly made a big difference. I don't know what else is out there that can really take its place. At the same time, I'm resentful that I'm in this position. For example, I could pay for web space and use that as my blog, but that would not be the same in terms of interaction.

lady_babalon accused me of overreacting when I said my big fear is that LJ will go the way of so many previous dot-coms, and one day we'll log on and LJ just won't be here any more. "Never happen," she said, and she's probably right. Perhaps it's just a part of my larger fear of abandonment, or something like that. But it is not unreasonable to be afraid that LJ's technical problems will continue to snowball, and that gaps in reliability will continue to grow. I have already lost entries; how long will it be before I come here and half of my memories are gone?