Well we’ve got new drives installed and we’re going to be rebuilding the old sites from backups as fast as possible. Unfortunately, we recently outgrew the service we were using to backup the architecture and media files (we have over 500Gb of media files) and this crash happened before I managed to get a bigger backup drive configured. It’s always the way. As a result we’ve lost the old media files, so we’ll be getting the hosts to re-upload as many as possible. In addition, we’ll be providing an FTP drop box for the audience to send us any files they have that we don’t. And I’m also hoping we’ll be able to find a data forensic service that can pull stuff from our old dead drive. So I think we’ll be okay. It’ll probably take us a week to get all of the current shows back up and running. Thanks for all of the messages of support I’ve been getting via email and twitter.

As most of you know, TPN is a bootstrap operation. In an effort to build a genuinely new and independent media company, we haven’t taken any funding and I’ve been paying for it out of my own pocket for the last four years, with assistance from a little bit of advertising and your generous pledge donations. On the smell of an oily rag we’ve built a range of shows with an average of 400 – 500,000 listeners a month who download about 800,000 episodes each month (12 TERABYTES of out-bound traffic) and provide about 8 million page views. When you run a site with those stats on sticky-tape and chewing gum, sometimes stuff happens. Unfortunately this year we’ve had two major disasters – we were hacked back in March and now this hard drive failure.

But I’m proud of what we’ve built with so little resources and I want to thank everyone for their continued support. We’ll be back shortly.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 12:52 am and is filed under General, TPN Pledge Drive, TPN Week In Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.