Just learned that all Wambabes storefronts on and off UMD are suspended, closed or purged of content without warning. Any public info out there on why?

It's just that the suddenness of it is a bit disconcerting, especially for a long-running producer. Hope Ariel is doing OK.

You Didn't See Anything!

Her profile is gone too

Jayce did mention that she was stepping back to some degree in an earlier thread: https://umd.net/forums/taking-customs-starting-this-weekend-new#postid_864146


At least Ariel seems to be doing fine. I'll just leave it at that.

Just wish I knew this was coming so I could to purchase a few more vids and pic sets from her nearly 20 years of back catalogue. Really feels like an end of an era.

I hope she is at a happy place in her life. She doesn't owe us anything.

Agreed, you don't expect a major, long-term established producer like Wambabes to just vanish with no warning, but even so, two things I'd always recommend to any buyer of WAM media:

1. If you like something, buy it now. Not next week, not after the new PC is paid for, not some time in the future. Buy it now. Because you really do never know when someone's store will simply cease to exist, sometimes with no warning at all.

2. Backups, backups, backups. Take out a subscription with BackBlaze.com (other on line backup services are available). Assume the hard drive or SSD that your WAM collection lives on will fail, because eventually, it will. Make sure your precious, irreplaceable data, is backed up on line and also backed up on a second disk or other storage medium.

I've been a fan of Ariel since she first showed up on this site. I'm sad to see her go, especially without an explanation, but lm glad to hear Jayce say she is doing well.

All things come to an end, even the best of them. I haven't been able to reach her in the past month or so either. Jayce hasn't told me much either. And take her message in the other forum to heart. If she feels she isn't in a place to talk about it, then that's that.

But there's no one here closer to her. So if Jayce says she's doing well, I believe it. I will miss the absolute shit outta her. She was one of my very first discoveries on the internet that I wasn't alone. I was starstruck and intimidated by her for a long long time. I was never close with her, but I'd like to think we were casual friends.

But yeah...life happens.

Didn't she have covid recently? Totally understand her wanting time to step away, she will always be one of the GOATS!

Super ironic (and very fortunate timing) that I bought a decent amount of Ariel's content from there for the first time just this past week. Glad to hear she is well, and I wish her the best!

I second that Back ups are importain and if you can aford it back up the back up too

Yep. You should always have at least three copies of all important data:
1. The main version on your PC or personal device that you actually watch.
2. An automatically on-line backed-up copy of that device, uising someone like BackBlaze.
3. A second copy on an external disk, USB drive, or similar.

And regularly check that the backups are complete and usable.

So often we see posts here from people who "had a great scene from Store X, but lost it in a drive crash, anyone know where I can re-buy it", and the reality is that Store X went out of business a dozen years ago and all trace is gone forever. The simple act of making a second copy and storing it somewhere secure completely protects against that.

I often sing the praises of BackBlaze.com here, I've no personal interest, just find them an awesome, really cheap, and incredibly easy to use on-line backup solution. There's none of that faffing about "selecting folders to backup" you used to get with backup products - instead you sign up, install the widget, and it backs up your entire computer, including external hard drives as long as they stay attached, in the background with absolutely no user intervention needed at all. It's utterly brilliant and I can't recommend it enough.

They also produce some very useful drive reliability statistics on their blog, which are very handy to refer to when selecting new drives to install in systems, and you want to maximise reliability.

My hard drive with 10+ years of wam content crashed like a week before this discovery. When I logged on to buy some of the videos I'll miss the most, I saw her store was gone. Absolute bummer that might take me out of this fetish for good. No one made content like Ariel.

I'm happy she is doing well, that's all that matters.

Ouch! Talk about bad timing.
There are specialists who can recover the data, though it's not cheap. About 7 years back I'd a 4TB disk, with the master copies of several thousand dollars worth of unreleased scenes on it, go South with no warning. I had to pay a specialist in the West Riding over $700 to recover the data, but they did get it all back. I signed up to Backblaze the instant I got data access back.

I'm sure Ariel had her reasons. I seem to recall reading somewhere that she had recently started nursing school? That alone would be sufficient for most people to shut down a fetish store. While most everyone on here is open-minded and accepting of the WAM fetish (or they wouldn't be here) we sometimes forget that the rest of the world still kink shames. So trying to move into a legitimate profession would certainly make one reconsider shooting fetish material.

Alternatively, perhaps she met someone special, and is simply ready to close this particular chapter of her life. One could not blame her if that were the case.

Regardless, I wish her well. I only corresponded with her a few times, but she always seemed very sweet and kind.

Get a NAS (Network Attached Storage Device) and set it up with a proper RAID. You are storing pornographic content. Not something I would house on an online provider. A video here and there for travel is one thing. But your collection should be kept private. For under 500 bucks I have 12 terabyte of storage (4, 4 terabyte drives, you burn one for the RAID so it comes out to 12 and not 16).

Another curious thing: If you click on Ariel's posting history, it appears that she hasn't started a thread on the forums here for just over a year?!? Can that really be true? (I think she has posted videos significantly more recently than that, but maybe all the auto posts that go along with new downloads are removed when the store is removed?)

Looks like the last time she posted on someone else's thread (Jayce's) was 7.5 months ago.

And yet she logged into the UMD just 13 hours ago, according to her profile. So I guess she's out there, watching this fresh drama silently, sort of like Tom Sawyer watching his own (bogus) funeral from a distance. If only Ariel's retirement was bogus too and she was about to spring back onto the forums with a triumphant "I'm back, bitches!" But it seems unlikely.

I echo Potatoman-J's sediment. So I'll admit I became a little concerned after my last custom. Ariel would always seem to take the time to reply to my emails no matter what. But just recently that came to a stop.

Ariel was truly a one in a million person. Thanks for the memories and helping me through the good times along with the bad.

Trust me, as someone who's been building and running ISPs for the last 20+ years, RAID isn't the panacea many think it is, especially with terrabyte-scale disks. The most common setup is RAID5, where you can lose one disk and not lose any data. So a disk fails, system detects it, gives you a warning, you buy a replacement disk and swap it for the failed one. The array then rebuilds the data onto the new disk so you're back to fault-tolerance. Sounds good. Except what sometimes happens is one disk fails, you replace it, and the extra load of the rebuild process promptly causes one of the others to go bang. At which point you've lost your data.

As to security, Backblaze stores everything in encrypted 30MB blocks scattered across dozens of storage pods and mixed with thousands of other customers' data, it's not as if anyone can casually log in to a storage pod and browse your files. I'd expect other backup providers to be similar.

Also, a RAID doesn't protect against a power spike frying the controller, or someone breaking in and stealing the physical device, or the house burning down. For that you need off-site copies, either on-line or if you're really paranoid, external USB disks stored somewhere secure, in a storage warehouse or locked box at the office - and updated very regularly.


That doesn't necessarily mean anything sinister, often a web host will have a generic "Suspend Site" function which is usually triggered automatically by billing issues, but can also be activated manually by clicking a button in the control system. It's not usually worth the bother of building a separate "user has chosen to close their account" function, if someone does request their sites be taken down, you hit "Suspend" to turn off the public service, while still leaving the data intact so the user can download an archive if they need to. There'll usually also be a "Cease" function that really is "nuke from orbit", which erases everything completely, web data, email mailboxes, DNS records, the works. Once that's triggered you get DNS lookup failures and "site cannot be found" if you try and visit it - the domain may still be registered but with no records in DNS.

Must admit I am very surprised Ariel didn't do a "Sites closing in 3 months, grab anything you want now" final sale, as you'd think that would have generated a nice farewell sales and income boost, but presumably she has her reasons for how she's done it. As with everyone else, I hope she's OK and has good future plans. Who knows, perhaps she's won a lottery and retired to a life of luxury?

That's what happens if you don't go Web3. You run the risk of getting shutdown.

Even though she was here for a long time I bet she won't miss cleaning up
After shoots. Especially the industrial size wam scenes she would do. It be fun to do it all the time but just like anything it becomes a job and the novelty can wear off.

I'll be honest, it's kind of rude to her fans to just close up with zero notice. It's definitely not a behavior that other producers need to mimic.
After seeing stuff by Jayce we can assume she's alright. So just doing this out of the blue seems really wacky and poorly done.
As long as she has been around she should have given everyone a proper "closing down" time period.

Soundguy can resend ALL your Vidown purchases to you again if your hard drive does crash. (Although he'll yell at you for not backing up properly first. ) So maybe contact him as that could be a solution?
That said, if the store has been removed, then he might not be able to resend those downloads. I honestly don't know.

Also, producers quit for all sorts of reasons. Most of them tend to be personal and not necessarily something where you want to draw attention to your absence. As someone who stepped away from the community for a LONG hiatus about a decade ago, I just hope she's doing OK and, while we're bound to be disappointed Ariel left in a hurry, she also doesn't owe us ANYTHING in terms of an explanation or timeline.

I can certainly attest to the fact that life can throw curve balls at you, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

A lot of the time it can be that not talking can be the only path you can take, in part because others might not understand but also because, ironically, people can be too caring that it's suffocating and makes the situation for you all that more difficult.

I don't know the circumstances, I wouldn't want to speculate either because it's not my place, but from my own experience I know that space is very often what's needed the most.

All the best, wherever you've gotten too.

The abrupt departure is concerning here. If it was just that she decided to retire, I would expect an announcement and a set date. Just closing her stores and disappearing is worrying. I suspect based on Jayce's comment about her not feeling proud right now that something happened to make her pull back (and we all know what kind of things happen - we've seen it before). Ariel has been here for a very long time and doesn't seem easy to scare off, so hopefully she is really ok. Jayce says she is and her and Ariel are close, so she would know.

If she's gone, she is going to be missed in the community.

I am really glad that I decided to grab the rest of the Dixie videos from Ariel's store now.

I wish Ariel the best. She is among my favorite WAM models, and I am very grateful that she, along with Jayce and Alice, starred in the custom vid I requested. Ariel, you are deeply loved!

That is true, with certain professions you have to really show discretion or it can affect your professional life, plus if you have kids and they grow up you have to take into consideration about their lives if their friends find out about what their mom does and whatnot. I'm not saying this is the case for her but I'm speaking in general about people leaving this world.

tl;dr please don't take this as me shitting on your or your opinion it's not meant that way, just to keep things from flaming out into a "this isn't fair" thread.

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You are of course entitled to your opinion, but without knowing the reasons for such a fast departure (which could be many), one could also counter and say that your take is rude.

For instance, we've all heard stories about adult working being used against someone for numerous reasons; many not very noble. There are a ton of legit reasons for someone to close up shop with no warning. She might not even be in a position to talk about it now. Also keep in mind, she's a mom first.

We see businesses close with little to no warning all the time, I don't see how this is any different. This is hardly the first time a producer has closed up shop without a word. In fact, people come and go here all the time, with little to no warning. And usually when someone does announce their leaving they get shit for it (sometimes deserved, and other times not so much).

If Ariel can do this quickly and Jayce can't even tell us why, then she sure as shit doesn't owe US any explanation or reasoning. I know that sounds harsh, but if you really think about it, we're not her loved ones, we're her customers and this is a public forum.

Yeah, it's sad, it's frustrating. But that's life. I'm just glad that Jayce told us what she did. Maybe Ariel will come back and tell us, maybe she won't. But I can't in good conscience give her shit about her decision, especially after 2 decades of some of the best and most memorable content ever made.

Nah, I'd rather have a drink to her, remember her fondly, and wish her well in whatever she's facing in life. She deserves that.

Here's to Miss Ariel