A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about Diary-X going offline. Tonight, this is what I found when I went to check on the status of things (which I’m reposting here since it won’t be there much longer):

Diary-X has suffered from an unrecoverable drive failure. Due to a combination of issues, the last backup (from December 2004) contained only configuration files and other non-essential files. We do not have any other backups for the site. All journals, user information, forum posts, templates, images, and everything else are all irrecoverably lost.

In the past several hours, I have had to decide whether or not I should put the site back online at all. Only those users who backed up their own journals (either using the journal download tool or otherwise saving each entry) would be able to reconstruct their journals. Everyone else would have to start over. Whatever developed as a result would still be called Diary-X, but it wouldn’t be the same.

I believe it makes the most sense to close Diary-X permanently. Tentatively, the site will go dark on March 31st, 2006.

I had a long conversation with the engineer that worked on the drive. What happened was that the read heads slipped slightly out of alignment and began what is known as ‘head skip,’ which means that the heads skipped along the platters like a stone across water. Each time they hit the platters, they destroyed a little bit of data (somewhere around 256 bytes). Because they were skipping, they were reading bad data, so the drive attempted to compensate by moving the heads away and back again, which caused the heads to skip into more areas, which the drive then attempted to read from, which moved the head and caused more damage. Given that the drive spins at 7200 RPM, a few hours worth of this type of treatment just completely hosed the drive. DriveSavers was able to get ‘fragments of files,’ but they were not able to recover anything substantial at all. The physical damage was just too extensive.

So, since I didn’t save a backup of my entries, four years worth of four separate journals - where I poured out my heart and mind and soul - are gone. Vanished. *poof* Many of my friends are in the same boat.

And now, at the center of dozens of contradictory thoughts & feelings, all I can think now is… it’s for the best. It has to be. I can’t let myself think of it any other way.