Old Posts, and Photos, and Videos Gone Dead.

I've been doing something I'd never thought about, not even in science-fiction inspired daydreams.

Lately I've found that I feel compelled to go back to very old blog posts (which people still see and search out) so that I can "fix" them. The main problems that I've seen cropping up over the past few years are vanished images, ruined video footage, and dead links. These are things that have resulted from the changing world of the Internet and the alteration of accompanying technologies.

In the past I've talked about how I tried to hedge my bets when it came to posting videos. This is the most prevalent problem I face in trying to do housekeeping on older posts here at my blog (which, strange though it seems to me, gets anywhere from 14K to 17K+ hits a month). Back in the day I tried to use several video hosting sites just in case one or more of them went under. One huge mistake I made was to situate a lot of my outdoor videos at the late Google Videos. Of course they ended up closing down and I lost many links that way. In fact, I completely lost some video footage because I bet on the wrong horse with that one.

So I go back and check on some of my hiking and backpacking blog essays to find missing images and blank spots where the videos I had listed once ran. In some cases I have completely lost the video that accompanied the essays because I had a couple of hard drive disasters that wiped them completely from the face of the Earth. In those cases I (and my readers) are just out of luck. But because I have two high-capacity external hard drives, I have managed to preserve about 95% of my old videos. The ones that weren't lost forever I have been able to retrieve and re-post, along with modified images that were also missing or skewed.

Last night I edited and repaired an old photo essay I created about hiking down into Linville Gorge and then back up to the lip of the chasm to hike the legendary Rock Jock Trail. I found the missing video and the vanished images and pretty much fixed up the old essay so that people can once again make sense of it.

The weird and ever-changing world of the Internet. I just hope YouTube stays with us, because I have a ton of stuff stashed there for easy access to my blog.

That day in 2009 in Daffodil Flats down in the bottom of Linville Gorge.

On the shore of the Linville River.

And a recovered video. Thank goodness for high capacity external hard drives.