[Harp-L] Garply archive drive status/Saga/Long

[owner-harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx]

Some of you may remember our long stay at the garply.com host.  After a
policy change and the impending graduation of our list founder, Chris
Pierce forced us to move we were generously hosted by Hugh Messinger at
garply.com.  Garply went through a series of changes, as did Hugh and we
eventually ended up Hughless and at a new isp, value price hosting.  In
the process we lost our archives.


What happened  to cause this loss was a catastrophic disk crash of the
garply server.  Michael Polesky then the listowner of harp-l generously
funded the replacement of the harp-l drive.  We ended up with the list
back but Hughless the archives never were rebuilt.  As I mentioned above
garply eventually was sold and the DEC Alpha we were hosted on went off
line.  Some time went by and we lost track of the garply folks and the
actual location of our hard drive.  Somewhere in all of this Bobbie
Giordono did some sleuthing on the acqusition of the former garply.com
company and came up with zio.com as the new owners.  She e-mailed this
information to the former workers group at harp-l.  I kept that
information for a couple of years until one day I decided to spend some
time trying to track down the drive. I got lucky and ended up tracking
down a phone number that eventually worked.  I left a message and about a
week later I got a return phone call from a guy named Steve who thought he
knew where the drive was.  More time went by and the drive was located,
Rich Drinkard a former employee of garply had our drive and he was willing
to get it back to us.  Steve eventually shipped me the drive but alas it
arrived badly packaged and not really working.

At the time I had no idea the drive didn't work because I lacked the
interface to actually try and access the contents.  Many months later I
acquired a SCSI card and cabling and tried to spin up the drive, it worked
initially but ended up shutting down after about 15 minutes.  More time
went by and I located a repair facility for that particular drive and sent
it in for evaluation.  $150 later I got the word the data recovery was our
only option and that would start at $1100 and go up quickly  in cost from
there.  I opted to just have the drive returned.

Not wanting to look at a big box on my floor again I cleverly had the
drive shipped to it's actual owner, Michael Polesky.  Michael for some
reason that I still don't really understand decided the thing to do was
attempt data recovery.  Not ever being really comfortable with the first
place I'd sent the drive I'd searched the web and found what I felt was a
better data recovery company.  Ironicly it turned out to be within miles
of my house, if I'd only known.  The drive ended up shipped to the company
the data recovery attempt was successful.  I now have a DVD disc of the
entire garply drive contents.  The early pre crash archives are there. 
The remaining information exists in the form of digests.

We're now in the place that completely restored archives are actually
within our grasp.  The raw data is actually in hand.  A very large amount
of work still remains and it will take some time but eventually it will
happen.  None of this would have happened without the generous
contribution of Michael Polesky, he paid for the data recovery.  I'd also
give a lot of credit to Bobbie Giordono for providing a very key piece of
information that I just happened to actually hold on to.  Oh and if you
ever have a drive failure and really want your data  back I was very happy
with Data Recovery and Reconstruction and the owner Michael Peletier.  I
still don't know what to do with the damn drive though.  In spite of my
best efforts to avoid it I now have a full height Micropolis model 1991
hard drive sitting on my floor in a box.  Anyone want a harp-l souvenir? 
fjm harp-l-listowner