Having wiped my computer recently and reloaded everything I know now the relief that comes from having good backups of personal data. However, for a few years I've been using online services such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and Tumblr to host my online posts. Over the weekend, I was shocked to discover that both LiveJournal and Tumblr were simultaneously unreachable; one was upgrading its network and the other was experiencing such a heavy network load that it shut down temporarily.

Yesterday, a friend's Facebook account was suspended due to suspicious activity. She grieved that her account was the only place that some of her photos existed, due to a past hard drive failure. She tried multiple times to have Facebook send her a recovery code email, but her current email provider never received the emails. Eventually the issue was resolved, but it drove home an important point for me: I cannot solely trust the internet to host my data.

To that end, I'd like to import all of my Blogger and LiveJournal entries and comments into a Wordpress installation. Previously I stalled because I wanted a patch I submitted eight months ago to get committed to the Wordpress code; it would fix a LiveJournal import bug. It's never been fixed, but perhaps after this weekend I'll have time to review the code and submit a new patch that will work with the current version of Wordpress.