Contemplating loss, and the process of moving on.
No, nobody died. But my hard drive did, a few months back, and I lost a ton of things in the process. See, it died in the middle of an imaging backup, so it was in the process of overwriting my existing backup when the drive failed. And you can't restore a partial image. Needless to say, since then, I've been looking at the backup process very differently than I did before.
One of the casualties of that malfunction was my AIRMail project. For those of you who hadn't heard of it before now, AIRMail is a Flex/Flash/AIR based, socket communications driven e-mail client. I had done a ton of work on the user interface and base classes for the project, and absolutely everything was gone. Well, I've finally decided to start the (long) process of rebuilding AIRMail. In initial tests a couple of nights ago, I had the POP3.as binary socket class returning a list of messages from the server. I'm doing this by sending the appropriate message to the POP3 server and capturing the server's response.
Once I have it finished, I'll be blogging about the specifics of the process, including a few cool tricks that help me to separate the data I want from the rest of the message. So, for those of you who've been waiting for an update on AIRMail, there you have it.
Aug 5, 2008 at 6:16 PM I'm very sorry for your loss here! I can't imagine losing all that work! Are you still continuing development? I'd really love to use the library. I think it would be cool say to have an AIR client that was similar to GMail. I thought the as3mail project that you setup on RIAForge was just a library, not necessarily a client. I'd be more then willing to help test out the library and build a client for it! Let me know if you plan to continue with it.
Aug 19, 2008 at 10:17 AM Save early, and save often (one of my mantras...).
I've had great results using Seagate's FreeAgent external drives-I use a few of them as backups, and they are inexpensive (about as cheap as assembling my own from a case & an internal drive). I got a deal on them at Circuit City via Fatwallet about a year ago and have had only one hiccup each (that only required powering them off and back on), which is a decent "track record" for an external drive IMHO. FWIW, these drives see a _lot_ of usage from me as I continue to digitize my massive record library and I highly recommend that (so far) and their 3 year warranties.
Oct 14, 2008 at 1:41 PM Javier - I simply haven't had any time to work on the libraries yet. Once I get them working, I'll be on track for building the client as well. Hopefully soon!
Jon - I'm using a Time Capsule now, which has worked incredibly well. I back the hard drive from that up to another external drive to have some redundancy as well.