ASSESSING THE MASS FILE WIPEOUT FROM RAPIDSHARE AND DETERMINING STRATEGY

There's been a 600 pound white elephant sitting in the Mutant Sounds room for a while now, though the extent of its damage has until now meant that I've been unwilling and unable to confront it in all its magnitude before today. And that thing that must be confronted is this: while the Megaupload shutdown may have gotten all the press attention, Rapidshare's semi-recent decision to eliminate all files from their servers that were either unconnected to a paid account or from someone not signed in to their system (as per their current requirements) has created far more catastrophic damage for Mutant Sounds that what happened with Megaupload. It has in fact wiped close to 1200 titles from our blog, between the removal of many early files from a period when I was less than fastidious about remaining a member of Rapidshare and their interconnected elimination of all rapidshare links created by third party file-spreaders like Sharebee. It's taken me three consistent ten hour days of work to sift through the entirety of Mutant Sounds and figure out how many links are down, but I now have a final tally (1196 files; 813 of mine, 386 of Jim's) and a master list of all those files that are now gone from their system. Complicating matters, much of my collection is currently boxed up and/or in storage in preparation for a move.

my plan of attack is this: over the next few days, I'll be tooth-combing my way through both my own (admitted all over the place) files and those of my bandmate Matt from VDO to figure out everything we do have directly on hand to begin re-uploading. For the albums that don't prove to be directly accessible right now (read: from albums/tapes/CD's/CDR's that are currently boxed up and/or in storage), I'll be putting out a list of those titles to download once my sifting is done, so that, should you be so kind as to want to offer help in re-uploading titles, you can at that point.

This is surely a huge undertaking and an obvious setback for the blog, but Mutant will still be soldiering on regardless. Thanks to one and all for sticking by us for all these years…