Important: Read This, Please

[madbean]

Here's what happened:
At around 6pm on Friday the forum crashed right after some automatic maintenance. I attempted to do typical repairs available through CPANEL and smf repair guides. These were not successful. After some more digging around info seemed to point at a server problem and not something I could fix. I contacted the host to ask for help. They advised to restore either a local backup or their last automatic backup. I asked them to restore their backup since it was only 24 hours old. Then, they did nothing. Nada. I asked them two more times for updates and it turns out that they waited too long. The automatic backup was overwritten. The entire messages table was lost. Luckily, I had a backup for them to restore. Now the bad news: It's from May 2015. This means everything since May is lost forever.

I'm pretty well livid. Obviously, I f'd up by not doing more regular backups. But, this should not have happened. If they had done what I asked when I asked it we would have lost at most 24 hours of the forum. Now, we've lost 7 months. So, we'll just have to move forward. Obviously, I'm going to be backing this thing up a lot more regularly and if it happens again I know exactly what to do. In the meantime, I am very sorry to all the members. There's no way of knowing just how much we've lost here and it is devastating, but it could have been worse.

For now, any member that registered in the last seven months will have to re-register. We will also need to re-create Freppo's sub-forum. And, worst of all, we lost the entire BOTY contest. In fact, I was coming on the forum right around the time it crashed on Friday expressly to announce all the winners. I do know that Leevibe won the grand prize, so if anyone else can tell me the order of the runner's up please let me know and we'll get it sorted!

If anyone encounters issues as we start to use the forum again, please post it here. I'm going to keep a hawk's eye on this for the next few days.

[davent]

Heartbreaker, I can feel your ire!
Very sorry to hear this...

dave

[m-Kresol]

Sorry to hear about it, there sure was a lot of fun and good things happening in the last 7 months. But hey, we just make even more awesome stuff in 2016!

As far as the contest goes, I think that chuckbuick came in second, the floidian slip was third, cortexturizers aqualung fourth and then (I'm more guessing now) the fuzz saw. I hope someone can confirm this.

[pryde]

Wow major suckage.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk

[pryde]

Wow major suckage.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk

[Haberdasher]

Oof, I know that has to hurt man, and I'm sorry for your troubles.  It's pretty inexcusable they didn't act when you asked them to.  If you ask me that is some lousy customer service.
Anyway, there probably won't be too many "regulars" around here not affected by this in some way.  I suggest everyone just take a deep breath and accept it, because it doesn't sound like there's anything anyone can do about it.

[Leevibe]

Oh man. Sorry to hear that Brian. I would be livid too! Oh well, this is what we call a first world problem.

[wgc]

Just a crazy thought, but do they back up every 24 hrs?  If so what about the back up that happened thurs?  Probably not what you want to think about...

Anyway sorry to hear of all the trouble.  Crappy service on the host end for sure.

[culturejam]

Tough loss there. But at least we didn't lose everything. *That* would have been devastating.

[culturejam]

Incidentally, I get an error when I post, but it looks like the posts are actually hitting the database properly.

[gtr2]

Very sorry Brian.  What an unfortunate situation.
The community will carry on...

[Zigcat]

Nooooo! It's gone! All of the amazing resources from the super helpful and knowledgable contributors here, gone! It's super sad but... Now I can ask dumb questions again without being sent to the link that answers it. We can rebuild.

[selfdestroyer]

I bet the stress of this ordeal is insane Brian. Being in the IT field, this kind of disaster happens at some point. I have had a similar problem but I had a current back up but...7zip compression actually corrupted the compressed files so ALL my backups were useless. I learned a valuable lesson and moved on. Its all you can do.

If there is anything I can do Brian, don't hesitate to ask.

We shall rebuild and rise again!

Cody

[nzCdog]

Epic bummer. Sounds like a real stressmare.

[Leevibe]

I bet the stress of this ordeal is insane Brian. Being in the IT field, this kind of disaster happens at some point. I have had a similar problem but I had a current back up but...7zip compression actually corrupted the compressed files so ALL my backups were useless. I learned a valuable lesson and moved on. Its all you can do.

If there is anything I can do Brian, don't hesitate to ask.

We shall rebuild and rise again!

Cody

And this time we'll be bionic!