Fixing the archives | NEWS

A while ago we started to notice some of our earlier features had been corrupted by a piece of nasty malware. All the text had been repeatedly overwritten by paragraphs from an old and unrelated feature.

In fact, if I see anything beginning with the sentence “Approx 70 or so motorcycles of all shapes, sizes and ages were entered into the Oliver’s Mount Race Circuit Hillclimb on Sunday 8th October. Vintage bikes…” I’ll not be very happy. 

Yes, that was part of the text that had taken over our archives. In fact, 634 (yes six hundred and thirty-four) of our posts/news/features and road tests had been affected. Just imagine how much time, effort and money that lot had taken to do, photograph, edit videos, write the features, lay them out… It still almost brings me to tears.

Well, there is, at last, some good news…

Over the last few weeks, all those corrupt features were ‘unpublished’ again and sat in my bulging ‘drafts’ folder waiting for me to pluck up the courage to ‘select all’ and delete them.

Then I discovered a way to save them, this was literally a last-minute very lucky reprieve.

For 10 days, (so far and counting) I’ve been painstakingly cleaning out all the nasty repetitive text from those features – one by one. It’s a slow and laborious process, one not without its compromises but it means that those old articles are saved from the scrap heap! It means I’m not crying every time I get an email from a reader asking why they can’t read something like our ‘Vespa Big Box Exhaust Shootout.’

I can only apologise for the lack of new stuff at the minute but I’ve ONLY got 165 more articles to go. Yes, that is still a lot but when you’ve been watching the numbers slowly counting down since 600 it feels like a tonne weight has been lifted.