My works... destroyed...

I have decided to write this, as I am livid and enraged at what has been done by this site.

This site was the lone site that had the sheet and MIDI files of my works. Now, due to this... butchering of this site, many of them are now permanently lost. Countless hours of work, years of blood, sweat, and tears... all for nothing. The archiving was so poorly done as to irreparably damage the works, and now, I no longer have access to my own creations any longer. Very few were able to be salvaged, and all this comes with not so much a sorry from YC. I have suffered extreme loss on part of YC, and I have no remote form of reparations from them.

I want my works back. After that, I will no longer use this site, as I now know it to be unreliable.

Hello,

None of your works have been lost, but you did help me catch an error, so thank you for that.  I've fixed the error and you can retrieve all your works here:

Your Works

I realize it is frustrating when a website has changed, but this new system that we have is much more secure and less prone to attacks.  Furthermore, we as a community will be much better integrated in hopes to increase member engagement.  My focus is do just that, so I hope you understand.

The error was why I said they were lost. It prevented me from reclaiming several works (although, I do not remember if they had MIDI attached or not).

The frustration did not come from the change, but the poor implementation of the change.

Pro Tip:

Keep all your stuff backed up yourself; and keep backups of your backup. Don't rely on any one place to keep your work, let alone a site that's certainly not dedicated to being your storage locker. 

Just sayin'... any lost files should be a minor inconvenience at most.

9 hours ago, KakeiTheWolf said:

The error was why I said they were lost. It prevented me from reclaiming several works (although, I do not remember if they had MIDI attached or not).

This site is not inteded to be anyone's backup (although that could be a collateral purpose). It is intended to share our works and give and take feedback in order to improve as composers.

Hopefully you might withold any judgement and realize the real purpose of all this - especially if the purported "loss" didn't actually happen.

Good luck!

On 5/21/2016 at 5:44 PM, robinjessome said:

Pro Tip:

Keep all your stuff backed up yourself; and keep backups of your backup. Don't rely on any one place to keep your work, let alone a site that's certainly not dedicated to being your storage locker. 

Just sayin'... any lost files should be a minor inconvenience at most.

That's the best advice. I am very familiar with version upgrades and such in I.T. especially in production systems, the planning, the attention to detail, the concern for downtime. They are not trivial, and not every eventuality can be predicted. I give kudos to the managers of this website for a fine job. I only wish that they did it two years ago. "But soft ..."

Hmmm.. I don't seem to be able to open an old work in the archives either...  I can always re-upload, but it's a shame to lose the thread comments.  Moderators, should it be working again soon, or can I give you the error message I got to help fix the issue?

We've had issues with that system in terms of malware, which is one of many reasons why I had to close the system down and migrate us to the forum 100%.  This site also has been on a few blacklists unfortunately because of this malware, but we are slowly gaining back our reputation since I've cleaned everything, and performed this upgrade.  Because I don't have the time to upkeep with that old system in terms of the "coding portion", I've decided to just keep everything on this Invision Board platform.  I've already implemented the previous mp3 track and pdf system within these forums, and the code is extremely minimal, which is great for me.

While this may initially be an inconvenience, I do believe in the long term this will work out for the better.  My advice is to open a new thread in the uploads forums if you want to keep visibility of certain works.  In the meantime, we are trying to devise a better "Reviewer" system along with a more active staff, so that works have a higher chance of being reviewed.  Since the forum "commenting" system is far superior to our old system, these events can be better managed.

Not to kick the can again.. NEVER NEVER NEVER rely on a  website as a storage device..  I would never consider using any 'CLOUD' service either..  Adobe has this whole new rip-off scheme of their products with CC in the name..  That is you work on the cloud..   You pay more for it  in monthly charges.. And someone hacked it, and everyone lost their work..  surprise...   And sooner or later.. massive 'cloud' attacks will become more frequent. Possibly with malware demanding a ransom to get your data back..  

.. Make a few back-ups of your work.. Currently I put them on extra hard drives.. 

I feel very bad, you lost work..  I too have lost a lot of work over the years.. but I never leave just one copy somewhere. 

I agree with everyone here, don't rely on anything other than your own storage system for backups.  But I just want to emphasize again in this case, that no work has actually been lost.

Cloud storage in case the computer dies, paper file in case the internet goes down, computer file in case you can't find the paper file.  :D  And the more people you get it out to, the more chances it will survive the great forgetting that is history.  

46 minutes ago, pateceramics said:

Cloud storage in case the computer dies, paper file in case the internet goes down, computer file in case you can't find the paper file.  :D  And the more people you get it out to, the more chances it will survive the great forgetting that is history.  

 

That is good advice and should cover most cases. But fate has a way of, well, having its way. Before clouds I was working on a novel. It wasn't very good, but I had written two hundred pages of the first draft and I had hopes for it. i backed it up the best I could. Then one day I got home from work to a horrible scene. There was a huge hole in the side of my building with flames shooting out of it. Half the roof was blown off. Fire trucks everywhere. Firemen on adjacent roof tops with their hoses going full blast for hours. There had been a huge gas explosion and there was no saving anything. Luckily, my wife was still at work and no one else was hurt badly. They demolished the building two days later. This sort of puts loss in perspective. Still, I will never, ever, attempt to write a novel again.

Oh my God, Ken!  So lucky no one was hurt!!  

Sorry to hear that Ken. But at least you might say you have got the material for a new novel, should you change your mind!

To come back to the discussion, I agree with what pateceramics said. But she missed one thing: backing up on an external hard drive. Another means would be publishing one's work. That way, it would become public property and have the best chance of survival.

Hello, 

It looks like I have been affected by this and missed this forum thread when it was originally posted. 

Is there any way for me to recover works from this site before it was changed? 

Thanks 

Dan 

On 5/21/2016 at 6:29 PM, chopin said:

Your Works

Potentially stupid question, but where are my works? How do I find mine? 

On 10/30/2019 at 10:28 PM, DanJTitchener said:

Potentially stupid question, but where are my works? How do I find mine? 

 

Hi DanJTitchener. Sorry to inform you but all works posted prior to the April-May 2016 renovation of this website have been deleted. I had posted 181 pieces. But fortunately I had backups on my PC of everything I had posted. I hope that you had backups too. If you don't have backups, contact chopin and he might be able to send you some of your posted pieces from his own backup.