Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

Google will not save you from yourself

Consider this a public service announcement:

If you delete a Picasa Web Album that is associated with your blog, it will delete all the photos on your blog.

When you put it like that, it seems like it should be obvious. But consider this in your calculations - when I started blogging, there was no such thing as Picasa. There was a program called Hello and it was not very well integrated with Blogger. So when Picasa came around, and later when Web Albums appeared, my mind never really made the connection that photos on my blog = photos in the associated web album.

So when I went through my Picasa Web Albums and deleted what I considered to be online clutter - you know, albums called things like "My Adventures in Tucson" - I honestly never considered that it would erase all the pictures on my blog. The Confirm Delete message didn't give me a hint of it, either. I'm so used to having to double confirm everything I do on a computer these days (all those "are you sure you want to do that?" messages) that I expect a program to completely explain to me the ramifications of my actions. When all Picasa Web Albums warned me about was that the album would be erased, I thought, hey, that's what I'm trying to do. It said nothing about removing the photos from my blogs.

Magdalena's blog was completely decimated. No photos were left, at all. This blog had no photos left, either. Miriam's blog got hit here and there in a few places. So I'm slowly working at putting all of them back. It is tedious and boring and frustrating because it's my own fault.

It's funny because I always felt like I should have a backup of my children's blogs at least, but I figured that Google disappearing or crashing or going under was about the least likely thing to happen, ever.

I never even considered human error, certainly not on my part.

I've looked into iterasi already, but does anyone have any ideas for a program that does a full backup of a blog, including pictures? Or a time machine that will take me back to Thursday afternoon before I did this? Thanks.

Drive-by puking

Flashback Friday: Midnight's Ghost Stories