Recently, the very cool video side Vimeo announced that they would no longer be allowing videos which were just samples of the gameplay of video games. Needless to say, howling and gnashing of teeth followed. I don’t have a strong opinion on it either way (except that Vimeo is completely right and the people complaining can go hang), but one of the repeated comments baffled me. To wit, “Well, how long do I have before they are deleted? I need to back them up.”

Excuse me? The only copy of something that you presumably valued, since you were willing to take the time to record it and upload it to a video site so that we could all be bothered by it, exists only on some third-party video site?

Really?

Then I encourage Vimeo to delete all of those movies now, as an object lesson in proper digital asset management. Harsh, yes, but sometimes, that kind of lesson is the only one that sticks.

Needless to say, this was not truly bad luck.

A server failing is not “bad luck.” Computers fail. All the time. Bad luck is a meteor hitting the data center, or Godzilla rampaging through an Internet connection facility. A single, un-backed-up server losing its single, non-RAID disk is not “bad luck.” Depending on how prepared you are, it is either as boring as a kitchen light bulb burning out, or as disastrous as my friend’s experience. It is, however, something that you will have to confront sooner or later if you have any kind of public web presence.

Before you pick a $9.95 a month hosting plan, you might want to reflect on that.

Presenter: “Of course, this is all fake data.”
Audience member: “I would have thought that the use of Godzilla would have indicated that it was all fake data.”

Q: “What did XML get you (in this design)?”
A: “XML got us pain.”