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Update on missing posts

Nick

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HI everyone,

Just a few things here.

1st off, I'm still trying to assess what occurred here. A few notes to start:

I run backups of the database every single night. These are then backed up to an off-site location the next night. This happens every single day.

For some reason, my backups started failing on the morning of the 5th.

This morning, around 2AM, the server shut down, and then came back up again around 5AM. Since then, there were numerous database errors.

I put a ticket in to my host on our VPS account and they came back and told me there were missing tables. They told me they had a system restore back to December 15th. Luckily, i had the backup to to the morning of the 4th, so they restored from that instead. It doesn't seem to be (but I am still researching) possible to restore missing posts in that timeframe, but I am still trying to see if I can find a way.

I will still be working to uncover what occurred here. We are running on the latest versions of all our software so we have no known security issues. It could have just been a corrupted database. But when I find out more, I will let you all know. Thanks for your patience.
 

Nick

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attachment.php


You can see backups stopping on the 5th. no idea why.
 

Nick

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I'm tracking my own info here as I get it :)

Apparently there was unannounced maintenance on this server last night. ever since it came back up it had issues.
 

skiNEwhere

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I'm tracking my own info here as I get it :)

Apparently there was unannounced maintenance on this server last night. ever since it came back up it had issues.

Your host sucks. Is this the same host that moved your site to another server without telling you in advance?
 

mishka

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is this the reason why posts and entire threads disappearing? Is there anything can be done to restore them?
 

Nick

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Yes. So, I reached out to a very good system administrator I worked with before and he isn't able to recover the week's posts. I am partialy to blame - in a rush to get the site back up and running I asked my host to look into it. They told me they had a database backup from 12/15 (over a month old!). Luckily I run backups, but for some reason they stopped n January 5th. So I told them to restore to that date.

Now; the same problem was happening over at SkiMRV. I had the sysadmin look at it and he was able to fix it. There were crashed tables probably related to the reboot of the server. I wish I had reached out to him first because perhaps there would have been a way to preserve the posts then. But as of now, they are gone. I'm very sorry about that, this is the first time in my 3 1/2 years as the owner of AZ that we have actually lost data and it sucks. Luckily it's just a week and not a month or anything, but it's still a bummer for people that put time and effort into trip reports and other things.
 

joshua segal

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A quick read of this thread seems to have omitted one thing: Thanks, Nick for all you're doing - and I suspect we'll all survive if you can't find the missing postings.
 
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