Island Life missing episodes

Several portions of the Australian online vlogging series are no longer held by Austin Network. Large quantities of programs in possession of Austin Network, were wiped or destroyed to make way for newer programmes. In October 2021, Austin Network deleted/wiped archive episodes for one of two practical reasons — lack of space (and unable to ship to AustinAspen Network) and a lack of rebroadcast rights. Many selected episodes were destroyed as a result of this and this continued up to May 2022. As of January 2024, only one episode is incomplete having only 2 minutes footage and the remaining episodes have been recovered thanks to Island Life fans and the enormous storage space (4TB) of the owner's external hard drive.

As a result, 24 Austin Network episodes were missing but throughout 2021 - 2022 were slowly recovered, much of the episodes originally recorded in 2020 and the other two AustinAspen Network episodes from Island Life are missing stock footage (one of the episodes were recovered thanks to the owner keeping a copy of the stock footage on his computer). Most were considered lost until recovered from private owners and the original stock footage. 24 of the 26 episodes have watermarks from Austin Network. The original owner has the stock footage and has made efforts to render the episodes in higher quality for AustinAspen Network. Efforts to locate missing episodes were complete by October 2022, mostly by fans of the series and the two episodes in January 2022 have been mostly recovered but one of the clips from episode 592 are entirely wiped from existence. The lost episodes with stock footage in episode 592 were lost forever due to an external hard drive corruption issue in January 2022 which has been mostly resolved. The stock footage from the hard drive has been re-rendered in high quality as of 2022. They have continued to be re-rendered in high quality long after AustinAspen Network gave up their broadcast rights.

### The end of the junkings

Internally, the wiping officially came to an end in May 2022 due to intervention from the then current broadcaster "AustinAspen Network" that had raided the storage vault and confiscated the remaining survived episodes. Austin Network has since had the episodes returned to them from AustinAspen Network in 2023 and Austin Network has kept them in an archive vault since then, preserved for posterity, historical and cultural reasons. In addition, the owner of the series has also kept the stock footage safe on an external 4TB hard drive.

### List of missing episodes

As of September 2022, just under 6 minutes of footage in Episode 592 is missing while the remaining episodes have been recovered. The issue with the missing footage in Episode 592 is the AustinAspen Network watermark, which is considered a problem for other TV stations outside AustinAspen Network as they have their own watermarks. Due to this issue, rerun broadcasts of Episode 592 are only about three minutes long but some had a smarter idea and put a mosaic over the AustinAspen Network watermark. The entire episode is up online though. For episode 1,000, the cameraman also laid a mosaic over the AustinAspen Network watermark on the Episode 592 clip as he does NOT have the stock footage of that clip.

The stock footage in Episode 592 was unable to be recovered as the hard drive was becoming corrupted after the drive was being read too much on two different laptops far too often.

**No.**

### Recovery

When AustinAspen Network raided Austin Network for the remaining episodes, some of the following episodes were absent from their collective archives, but have subsequently been handed in to AustinAspen Network through various methods. In addition, the now defunct Sam's New VIP Office 2020 & the current Sam's Island Life Office also have subsequent copies of the episodes. Episode 153 was somewhat rescued by AustinAspen Network in July 2022 and has been kept safe in their archive vault. They have been handed back to Austin Network after the sponsorship transfer on July 15, 2023. AustinAspen Network do not have any additional copies of the Island Life episodes.

\*Episode 133 was held by Sam's New VIP Office 2020 in September 2020 up until early 2022 when they gave a copy of the episode to AustinAspen Network as a reward for their dedicated loyalty to the series (this episode was then handed over to Austin Network in July 2023).

^Episode 153 was re-rendered in 2022 and handed to AustinAspen Network as part of the recovery effort of the missing Island Life episodes (this episode was handed over to Austin Network in July 2023).

Most of these episodes have also been re-rendered by the owner of Island Life in an attempt to preserve high quality renders of every episode. They have even been rendered without the TV watermarks.