Hard Lessons from Hardware Failure: Data Loss and Recovery in the La MaMa Archive

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• Zachariah@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  In July 2022, the La MaMa Archive, the living archive of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (ETC), experienced that dreaded hardware failure. Our server crashed and new drives had to be purchased and installed. A previous issue in 2021 had been resolved without incident, so Archive staff assumed data protections were working as they should. We discovered, to our dismay, that the automated processes had not been re-established after an earlier failure. The line of code meant to automatically create nightly backups of La MaMa’s digital catalog was faulty. The IT contractors had not been verifying the backups and never noticed that the system stopped creating mirrored files. Delays, poor communication, and failed attempts to reload the digital collections site left us offline and in limbo for more than a month.

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