Things are progressing here - albeit slowly. Of course my email programme was on the dead drive (one of the very, very few programmes not on the newer C: partition on a different physical drive), so that had to be re-installed and the data backup restored. This happened successfully (yay!) so I can now access my email archive again, and, even more importantly, work on the mails properly and not just in emergency mode over the mobile phone. 

There's a solid chance that the new HDD will arrive today, and then I can power down the machine here, put the new one in, and do a proper restore of everything that lived on the old place. Well, apart from the D: drive, which was not included in any backup (causing the issues with the mail programme, for instance) and I sincerely hope that there was nothing important stored on that drive, because it's dead as a doorknob.

On the upside - I have found out what caused the excruciating slowness and proneness to errors with my backup.It was an overenthusiastic Antivirus programme, which decided that since the RAID that the backups are stored on are not an internal drive, everything on them might be dangerous and contain a virus and thus has to be checked very, very thoroughly. Which, obviously, will take time...

So from now on I will try remember that, and if something concernes an external drive and then takes ages, I'll look for the antivirus as a possible culprit. If you're running into a similar problem on your computer, you can either turn off the antivir or, if using the Windows Defender antivirus (which, according to reports, is about as good in getting the bad guys as the free versions of standalones are) there's the possibility to exclude folders from getting scanned.

Oh, and because it bears repeating: if you haven't made your backup yet... well, you know. There's a lot of free and even more affordable programmes for backups out there; some external HDDs come with backup software pre-installed, so you should be able to find a solution without too much trouble. In case you don't want to look about that much at all and already have a drive of five lying around that you can store stuff on, I've used SyncBack Free for a long time and can recommend it.

I will be off travelling north tomorrow, and will return on Monday, so there will be blog silence until Tuesday... when I will hopefully also be able to work from a restored drive.

It's slow going here. Slow going part one: The resurrection of my data. The backups lie on a RAID, to make extra sure that everything is safe - but unfortunately I'm having connection troubles to said RAID, which means every copying action takes ages and then some. That is annoying, and slow going, and sometimes the connection trouble leads to the interruption of the copying process which means that some stuff is there, and some isn't, and I can't tell what is and what isn't. So things will take more time than expected. Which, to be frank, was to be expected, because just as the X never marks the spot, when has anything computer trouble related ever taken only as much time as expected?

(And just in case you are not thinking about that anyways right now: Do yourself a favour and check your backup solution. Make sure that it is current, and that everything important is covered, and that you can recover and restore your data if something dire happens. If you've been following this blog for a while, you've read me go on about this before, but, well, obviously it bears repeating. In the case you don't have a backup solution and regular backup plan yet... well. Do yourself a favour and change that.)

Slow going part two: Getting sorted (and packed) for the weekend in Brandenburg. That, though, was actually not as slow as I had feared! I have sorted my bits and bobs and odd ends of dyed embroidery silk and re-wound most of them onto better suited cores (reed cores, which I absolutely love). The gold thread is also sorted and packed, and now I am in the stage where I ponder what else I could need and put it all on the giant heap on the bed, from where it will be transferred into my rolling suitcase and, if necessary, an additional bag.

The main part of the preparation, though (and what I had expected to be slower and more gruesome) was making sure I can go ahead with gold embroidery right from Saturday morning. That meant inking my motif and doing the contour stitching as a minimum. Because gold and silk would be paired in such an embroidery, and because I wanted to be able to show at least a little bit of the silk part as well, I had planned to also do some split stitching.

This is stitched on fabric with about 20 threads per centimeter, which means that the stitches are fairly small. As you can see, there's a start made on the crow's wing feathers, and one of the corners of the frame is almost filled completely.  I'll do the last few missing stitches before the event starts, and this will give an impression of how the colour parts will look. The appropriate silks will also travel north with me so I can show that part of the work, too, if people are interested - just like I'll take some extra linen and the things to make pre-drawings or ink in motifs.

Because the thread is thin and the stitches are small, it does take a bit to get one of the corners filled, but it was enormously pleasant work - and in contrast to the computer stuff, progress was noticeable and there was no constant apprehension that there would be an error message.

Enter your text here ...

One of the things scheduled for the summer break (for the days I was not on vacation, or relaxing) was taking care of the website migration to the next major version of Joomla. Ah, website stuff again! Just the thing for late summer, right?

Of course I didn't manage to completely finish the whole shebang, but the major problems have been found, identified, and taken care of. Fortunately there were not too many of them, nor were they very hard to fix; for the most part, it's semi-brainless work to re-install newer versions of the many add-ons and extensions that accumulate over time. (And that even though I try hard to keep things as slim and streamlined as possible...) 

Now I "only" need to fix the smaller things that get jumbled during transition. That's mostly shop layout tweakings so everything is properly legible and all the legal shenanigans are covered. All that gets done on a test site, which is a clone of the live site, and I jot down the single steps to take in a list. Once everything is done and fixed and wrapped up, the live site will go offline for the transition (because it would be irksome if somebody ordered a stack of things just then), and get cloned again, and then I will go through that lovely list step by step to pull the old version over into Joomla 4.

The current website has also suffered a few little mishaps during the last update, which I (rather stupidly) did just before we went off on holidays. Most of the time, the updates go smoothly and not much is changing, but sometimes, stuff gets jumbled, or mis-aligned, or something gets lost in transition, or a link disappears - small things like that. Of course some of this happened during the last update... which I will hopefully catch all during the works on the site in the next few days. If things go well, end of next week might be realistic for the actual transfer...

I've been trying to get the Textile Forum website up to speed, and I was working along happily, and everything was looking good, and then I managed to seriously botch up. So, at some point in the process of getting the site updated and back to functional, I managed to kill it. Whether that is a fixable kill or a really bad one will have to be seen. 

Possibly tomorrow, as it might just be that I'll run out of brain juice pretty soon. Even though Madame the Cat is warming my arm as I type, and purring along. At the moment, I'm extracting a backup and hope that uploading the relevant files will fix it - if not, I'll have to do things to the database as well. Sigh. 

Ah, for those IT things to once work really smoothly. At least, though, I should be able to relatively quickly re-write the texts I wrote today, and that of course got eaten up by the botch. They were written in my quest to prepare for the next Forum... which will happen in November, and take place in Mayen, and I'm already looking forward to it.

So. Keeping my fingers crossed that things will not be too badly killed...