Picture: Truncated image file of Zion National Park, Utah, after having been downloaded from the Digital Railroad servers.
I’ve been watching and waiting since last week for that last poof of virtual smoke that would signal the final demise of Digital Railroad. That would be the moment when the server plugs got pulled from the wall, and I would no longer be able to access my own archive. First words said this would happen on Oct. 29th. Then words came that DRR would be kept on life support until 11:59pm on Oct. 31st. Well, the plug still seems to be in the wall, and servers still seem to be running, as the new management company hinted at a possible sale to Newscom.
But as life trickles on, I know many people scrambled to get images downloaded from DRR servers, onto new servers at places like PhotoShelter and other companies that tried to rescue the masses of trainwreck survivors. I should put out a warning that people who did download files from DRR check the structural integrity of those files. I downloaded numerous files from my own archive as I waited for the eventual shutdown. Most of the images downloaded fine, but about 20% downloaded as corrupted files. In otherwords, I got either a gif that said, “Image not available” or an image that had truncated or missing info, like the image shown here. So take a moment, and while there are still lights on at DRR, please check the file integrity of what you downloaded.
