[Harp-L] re: One of it's treasures

[owner-harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx]

> The archive of harp l I believe is a real treasure
> I hope it can stay whole for decades to come.
> It holds a lot of history and knowledge about the
> harmonica that would be hard to put back in one place
> again.


Indeed, I completely agree.

But wait there's more.  If you use the harp-l archives you'll notice that
there is a considerable gap in the middle.  Guess what?  Virtually all of
those archives exist.  The only reason they aren't up currently is
formatting problems.  They were not saved in the format we archive in and
the formatting is not all the same so writing a software tool to extract
and format the data is a project and it would still require a bunch of
hand checking to make sure that nothing gets missed.

Remember when we moved to the Garply server and kind of early on the
archives stopped working?  The assumption was none of that stuff was saved
but it actually was.  Things actually went from bad to worse, Our Garply
server hard drive crashed and all of that data was presumed gone forever. 
Our former listowner Michael Polesky paid for a replacement drive but none
of the archives were ever restored  When Garply finally did become defunct
we lost contact with the owners and never got access to our data.  Through
luck and persistence I was finally able to track down a former Garply
employee who knew where our physical drive was.  I arranged to have it
shipped to me but disaster again struck.  The drive was very poorly
packaged and it arrived un-bootable.

Fast forward a couple of years later we pursued a data recovery option
which was generously funded again by Michael Polesky.  That data was
recovered and we also discovered that all of those presumed lost files
existed, just not as an archive.  We've kind of been stuck just right
there since then.  It's definitely on the to do list. The September 11,
2001 posts are very interesting.

 harp-l-listowner