service notice

If you're looking at my blog's sidebar (and I know you aren't because, hell, who looks at sidebars anymore, right?), you may have noticed that many of the sidebar images are no longer showing up. These images, which date back years, are stored over at the image-hosting service Photobucket. Photobucket just put out its own service notice saying its main servers had suffered a massive power outage that is still proving hard to cope with.

Their message says in part:

On Wednesday, December 18th, we experienced a total power outage at our primary data center. The immediate shutdown resulted in systematic issues when the power was restored. We were also not able to rely on our backup data center resources. The [repair] process is taking longer than expected because the security we have in place requires additional processing time. [Sounds like bullshit to me.] We are in the process of migrating Photobucket to a more reliable environment. Once service is restored, our primary focus will be on moving your beloved images to this environment.

I've been planning to leave Photobucket for years, but I admit I've been dragging my feet about it. The ability to link to images hosted on that site has severely degraded over the past half-decade, and I've experienced numerous frustrations as old pics on my blog have been disappearing. At some point, when I have the time, I plan to migrate (to use Photobucket's own term) all my images off Photobucket and quit the service altogether. I pay $65 a year for this image-hosting service, and it's simply not worth the cost. Google charges me $2 a month for 100 GB of image storage, which is exponentially cheaper, not to mention plenty of space for my needs. Taking my images off Photobucket and re-posting currently "dead" images on my blog will be a daunting task: the blog is turning 17 this coming July 4th, and that's nearly 14,000 posts to wade through, many of which have embedded images. I'm not looking forward to this task, but at this point, I'd rather go through the miserable labor of migrating off Photobucket than stick with an unreliable service.

Upshot: the sidebar will look shitty for the next little while, but I'll be tackling it first before I deal with the restoration of old images in the blog's archives. It's likely that I have many of the images in storage on my Mac and/or the Mac's attached 750-gig external drive (thanks again, Hahna Kang, for giving that to me! I've barely scratched the surface when it comes to stored data!). Wish me luck as I embark upon this long, slow cleanup.

ADDENDUM: sidebar images are back, now loaded into Google storage.