Interesting thread about archives...
Speaking of which, the more eagle-eyed amongst you have spotted that the <ambit> archive has been unavailable for a few days. The mail archive server's been having some unusual and severe problems. Jeff, the dedicated fellow who runs the service, has just completed the restoration hundreds of Gigabytes of files from backup, but that took some time and some messages may continue to be unavailable for a while yet. Specifically, messages from the last 50 days are not available. See the message below for some reasons why:
"Ok, Mail-Archive is now restored to as it was about 50 days ago, which was the last time a full backup was made.
My plan is the following:
1) sleep 2) carefully start processing mail again 3) sleep some more 4) start thinking about the last fifty days"
That's one committed archivist!
I think this points up a major problem with digital archives: mechanical or system failure is likely, even on the most reliable platforms. I think the Dutch organisation V2 got it right by dubbing themselves "The Institute for Unstable Media".
-- -------------------------------------------------------- Chris Byrne [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------------------------------------- New Media Scotland tel: +44 131 477 3774 P.O. Box 23434, Edinburgh EH7 5SZ fax: +44 131 477 3775 Scotland, UK http://www.mediascot.org -------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] archive: http://www.mediascot.org/ambit info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and write "info ambit" in the message body -------------------------------------------------
