Bummed Out that photos are gone.

[Badger]

BTW, have any of you tried looking at the Photo Gallery today - I can't see anything there either !

Working now?

Just configuration issue...

Regards,
Doug

[Flying10uk]

I am modern enough to use USB sticks for archiving

I understood that USB's may only hold their memory for around 10 years? My understanding is that a DVD disc is safer and should last longer than a USB stick (in theory)?

[browningautorifle]

I understood that USB's may only hold their memory for around 10 years?

I have several memory sticks that have been in storage longer than that. They're fine. I just use the hard drive from my last laptop and put it in a box as an external hard drive. That carries everything you could want.

[Patrick Chadwick]

USB sticks or DVDs - they are both cheap enough and compact enough that I see no reason - other than laziness - to store all one‘s irreplaceable data as a single copy on a 3rd-party site that is not under your personal control.

And whatever the electronic medium - after 10 years you can be happy if it‘s readable at all. The backup cycle I described - which used to be a simple standard in the days when I started using computers - also guards against such „fading away“ effects, as the backup media is continually being refreshed or replaced. Or at least - it should be!

[72 usmc]

It seems few posts, if any, have been saved in the past to the Wayback Archive from milsurps. I did not find any of the normal posts that were saved that had missing photos. Granted, I only searched about 40.

As an example I just saved a current post to see if this forum's post could be saved and no problem. I saved in the The Restorer's Corner,
Thread: Milsurp rifle stock protection, cleaning/finishing questions which contains 3 pages. I saved each page separately so all three would be saved so the entire post was saved.
Anyone can save a post, it works fine with this forum.
I posted a new reply saving this post was saved to the Wayback, and provided the Wayback Machine links.
last page 3 of 3 https://www.milsurps.com/showthread.php?t=75456&page=3

[72 usmc]

More bad news, it seems that this was just posted on my home forum: SRF may be history... after 1999-present: 31 years of running.
You guys are lucky Badger is still doing the work to maintain the forum.
We are all getting old, sick, and no excess funds... Maybe some of the middle age persons with some computer knowledge and a good income will step up to the plate?

Again a big THANK YOU to Badger & those others that worked so hard to restore this forum.

[Aragorn243]

So what photos are missing? Mine are still here. I use Imgur.

[USGI]

The ones that were uploaded directly into the forum as attachments. They were assumed to be safe here and wouldn't be lost like some that were hosted elsewhere. They were being backed up here, too - but due to an unknown glitch, the backup folders for the pics were found to be empty! Mine are all gone - posts just show an "attachment number" where the pictures should appear. - Bob

[Badger]

So what photos are missing? Mine are still here. I use Imgur.

Your pics are preserved here by a different method because they were referenced from an external Imgur link. Even if Imgur goes away, they will still be here stored on our database.

https://www.milsurps.com/showthread.php?t=29369

The ones that were lost were direct attachments members made to their posts/threads, which our backup provider was failing to backup.

Regards,
Doug

[Patrick Chadwick]

As an example of what was lost:

The thread on refurbishing an Argentine Rolling Block, which extends over 19 forum pages - hundreds of posts - contained about 270 photos. It was, in effect, a book on how to turn what looked like a wallhanger into a functioning rifle again. And in some places it referred to other „how to do it“ threads that have also lost their pics. Embedded pics are still there, but all the attachments have vaporized.

This thread had been viewed about 156,000 times. So I hope it has been useful to somebody. At the moment I am suffering from a feeling of futility. Covid restrictions (the next range shutdown is imminent) and miserable weather don‘t help either!