I have been looking for new journals to read. My old favourites have been falling off the internet and I miss looking through the windows into people’s lives. I’ve found a couple that I like so far. Anyway, while I was going through all these new-to-me sites I noticed the lack of general ‘about’ pages. Most of them were confusing to just jump into, I didn’t know their age, gender, location [even a country would be nice] – I had no context so their entries were confusing at best. I thought maybe I could find more if I went through their archives, very often people introduce themselves or put their journal in context in their first post, this was sort of true, but the few I persisted with again left off age, gender, location etc. so when they’d mention simple things like ‘girlfriend’ I wasn’t sure if I’d found a lesbian or a man [either of which would be a welcome change frankly].

So this got me looking at my site again imagining that I’d never visited before and I knew nothing about me. My about page certainly helps and puts the entries in context, but for all intents and purposes the site only seems to have only begun in October 2006. When really, this version of my website started in February 2006 and I have journals dating back to 1998 [maybe 1996]. So last week I fired up the old [I mean old, circa 1997] zip disc and glanced through my files. I have never re-read my journals, they weird me out. Anyway, I updated my back-up with more recent entries on the disc and my computer crashed. So I restarted and it started scanning the hard drives [or so I thought] and I popped my zip disc out to protect it. Sadly it was scanning the zip disc and when it was interrupted it panicked and corrupted all my files. So I spent a very emotional Thursday feeling like I’d had my past ripped away from me. I have a very bad memory as far as my life goes and even though I hadn’t re-read my journals, I wanted to have the option of reading about how I met Horatio and what I thought of the flat when Weasel and I moved in in September 2000… I had a lot of things I wanted to remember.

I decided to have another look on Thursday night and discovered that the zip disc still reported that there was the same amount of space being taken up on the disc. So I had a nose around online and so did Weasel and we tried a few things that didn’t work. Then I remembered that Horatio is noted for crashing and restoring various systems so I gave him a call. He and Weasel tried a few more things and in the end realised that the .CHK files on the disc were my files, but re-named and messy. Thankfully the text of all my journals seems to be intact, unfortunately, I have to manually check 977 files. There are some old programs, back-ups of random files, old websites and lord only knows what else saved on the disc. Once I have my old journals in some semblance of order I’ll need to find a safer way of backing them up then I’ll have to see if I want to put them back online anywhere.