During the month of July 2010, a disaster took place that caused the Citizen to lose years of video data.

Weeks before the import of stories from story server (old Tucson Citizen website) into the "morgue" blog, maintenance personnel working in the server room of the Tucson Citizen tripped the wrong circuit breaker and cut power to the Tucson Citizen server, other servers, switches, and other critical pieces of hardware.

A half hour later, someone in IT eventually figured out what had happened and turned power back on. In that moment hardware was fried as electricity surged through the lifeless components. It took weeks to return to a stable state.

Unfortunately, the Tucson Citizen media server, the one that hosts videos, was fried. The hard drive was not part of the system that was backed up nightly. We think the hardware minus the hard drive survived. So, for the moment, all the old Tucson Citizen videos are lost.

However, do not lose hope! Contrary to the nutty Gannett conspiracy theorists (former employees) out there who think Gannett is out to screw them over again and again, we still have the raw video data in a secure area. A former employee kept DVD backup copies of all the content the Tucson Citizen put on its website. It is theoretically possible to bring all that video back AND perhaps improve on how you view them. The old videos were in both Quicktime and Windows Media formats. Today's videos are published in Flash Video (H.264) and perhaps soon HTML5. The main issue is making the time to import them.