The machine hosting elastic.org suffered a hard drive crash sometime the early morning of 2004-12-20. Being the computer-savvy individual I am, of course I did not have very recent backups.

The “/” and “/home” partitions were lost, with only a snapshot dated 2004-11-07 that luckily was kept around on a disembodied, formerly resident hard drive, but I did not realize that during the first day. We are lucky to have lost only six weeks’ worth of email, weblogs, photographs.

The machine was getting old and crusty anyhow, so I finally bought a newer model. For just around a k$, Alpha Plus Computers was willing to put together a new box on very short notice. It’s not quite up to the quad-Opteron dream box, but should do just fine for a few years. It features mirrored hard drives, which along with a portable external one I use for backups, should keep such a future accident from being quite so painful.

I would appreciate receiving copies from anyone having archived copies of email sent to or from me, or of photographs, from the memory-hole time period. I owe some gratitude to Microsoft’s new search engine, which squirreled away copies of all but one of my weblog entries, and to my parents who of course saved some pictures of Eric.