Re: Appeal from Tao collective

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> What does 'Heavy on-line footsteps' mean?

lots of people knocking on their web-door ...

i.e. their web server(s) was getting a high hit rate from their
network connection. and tao is speculating that the large resulting
number of web hits translated to large numbers of disk requests for
info from their hard drives, which could have caused a hardware
failure of same, especially if the disk was already oldish.

> We hope you have backups. Most of our backups were destroyed, as the
> hardware failure happened, yesterday, Sunday, when we were trying to
> install a new drive.

hmmm.... from this its not clear that the failure was related to hit
rates, or something more convulted happened during the disk change.

tis a shame there were no backups on an independent drive.

les schaffer