Archiving

#Wisdom-of-the-ancients #misc

Lost Television

We didn't always care about saving television. The idea that someone would re-watch a show was unheard of. And a lot of times rebroadcast rights were complicated, or not granted. So shows would get aired, and then destroyed. Why keep them?

Most famously, this led to thousands of hours of BBC shows (notably Dr. Who) being lost. Today, 97 episodes are still missing, surviving only in audio form.

Of the episodes that have been found, most were found why viewers who had taped them, or overseas broadcasters who had saved extra.

Marion Stokes

Possibly a hoarder, Stokes collected 24/7 VHS tapes of Fox, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and C-Span.

She planed her life around the lengths of VHS tapes, and would switch them out every 6 hours, keeping them in rented apartments and around her home. She also collected newspapers, books, toys, unopened Apple computers, and dollhouses. She was afraid the details of the news would disappear forever.

She was dedicated to fighting fake news, and somewhat fittingly, died while recording coverage of Sandy Hook, a tragedy that birthed no shortage of fake news, eventually bringing down Alex Jones of InfoWars.

Her collection was donated to the Internet Archive, which spent more than 7 years digitizing it all.

Toy Story

source

90% Toy Story 2 was deleted off of Pixar's servers, more than two months' of work, bam! gone. All because of an erroneous rm -rf command.

What about backups?

Nope! The backups were too big (4GB size limit) and the error logs were full, so no one read them. More specifically, the error logs were on the same (full) drive, so couldn't be written to. You look, you see an error log of 0 bytes, you continue working.

Saving Grace

The technical directory was on parental leave and was working from home (yay, working from home!) She had a local version, two weeks out of date and brought it back.

But it didn't matter

Turns out the film they saved wasn't very good. So they scrapped it and started over. Turns out not all archiving stories have a happy ending.