Lost to time goodreada
He got a round of applause from the sympathetic audience, but I got a laugh when I mimed the gesture of throwing up. “Thank God!” I’d texted.) Another friend, Pico Iyer, had lost his childhood home in a fire in California and when we’d been on a panel together, he’d said that the experience had taught him that the only things that matter are the things you can carry in your heart and head. I’d been really worried about this fire, and not only because, at the time, he had borrowed my copy of Mark Lilla’s “The Once and Future Liberal.” (Fortunately, it was not even smoke-damaged. But knowing me, knowing how well I knew where everything went, he must have known he could never pull off a heist like this.Īndrew’s own house in Los Angeles had partly burned down, so he was living elsewhere while it was renovated. My Olivier Todd biography of Camus had gone.Īndrew, an American friend who had stayed at the flat while we were away, was an avowed Camus fan and therefore the prime suspect. So that explained the weird feeling of unspecified wrong. I extended the search into the B’s and D’s. But where was Olivier Todd’s biography of Camus - a hardback that I’d reviewed when the English edition came out in 1997? It was conspicuous in its absence, like the character in the Dylan song: “The only person on the scene missin’ was the Jack of Hearts.” I looked along the Camus section, then to one side among the Calassos and Calvinos and, on the other, in the Careys (Peter) and Carys (Joyce). There it was, along with the biography by Herbert Lottman that had fallen apart while I was reading it in Algiers in 1991. On the third day, I needed to look up a line in “A Happy Death” and went over to the Camus section. There were quotes to check, and it was a pleasure, as always, to look these up - but some lingering, unspecified unease remained. Old hardbacks were reunited with the dust jackets that had been left behind as placeholders. There were some new books to cram into already tightly packed shelves. The floor-to-ceiling shelves, covering almost every inch of available wall, were stuffed with books, arranged in an order that makes sense only to me. Everything was as I had left it: filing cabinet, desk, lights, reclining chair for reading and napping.
Fortunately their export option works reasonably well, you just have to be sure to use it before they lose your data.I had been away from my study in London for six months, but as soon as I got back last December, I sensed that something was wrong. If you care about your reviews there, make your own backups. Since writing up my story I've heard from other Goodreads users who lost their data in other ways. It is negligent to not have any way to restore from a failure of their data systems.
I tried in my post here to be neutral but I'll editorialize now: it's shockingly negligent for Goodreads to lose a user's data like this. There's no way this makes sense as a reasonable thing to do with a customer's data. Unfortunately, once data has been removed, it's completely deleted from our system and we no longer have access to it. Our developers were able to look into this for you, and it appears that when you removed your Goodreads account from your Twitter account, this deleted the account. I mean hey, they had stopped support Twitter a year before! Then, according to Goodreads support So I removed Goodreads' access to the Twitter API. Then one day Goodreads tweeted some strange debug message to my Twitter account using the API access it still had. I long ago switched to using email/password to log in to Goodreads.
We wanted to let you know that we will no longer be supporting ‘login with Twitter’ or sharing to Twitter from early 2021 onwards