What happened (and what has been fixed)
Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:10 pm
As some of you may have noticed, the forums were down for about a week and a half. What happened?
My host decided to migrate the website to a new server, suddenly and without warning me. When they did so, they trashed the old server before making sure everything migrated correctly. I was on the phone with them an hour after they finished the migration, and still couldn't get them to fix the situation.
Their "emergency backup" contained a truncated version of the forum database. Fortunately, it included the posts table. Unfortunately, while I had a fairly recent backup of the posts table, I did not have very recent backups of the user and topics tables.
I have reconstructed the topics table (I believe), updated to a newer version of phpBB (this would have been much less painful if I had gotten around to my planned updates earlier), and restored what I could of the user tables. Some user account information has been lost permanently.
Some of you may remember similar issues arising in the summer of 2015, the last time my host decided to migrate my site to a new server (also without telling me, also trashing the old server before they made sure everything migrated correctly. Once is unfortunate, twice in a row smacks of gross incompetence, and it's probably time to change hosts.
The wiki seems to be trashed as well. I haven't even started trying to fix that.
In the long run, I have clearly lost the passion for the subject that kept me invested in spending time keeping this forum running smoothly; it may be time to pass the baton on to someone else with regard to running things around here.
My host decided to migrate the website to a new server, suddenly and without warning me. When they did so, they trashed the old server before making sure everything migrated correctly. I was on the phone with them an hour after they finished the migration, and still couldn't get them to fix the situation.
Their "emergency backup" contained a truncated version of the forum database. Fortunately, it included the posts table. Unfortunately, while I had a fairly recent backup of the posts table, I did not have very recent backups of the user and topics tables.
I have reconstructed the topics table (I believe), updated to a newer version of phpBB (this would have been much less painful if I had gotten around to my planned updates earlier), and restored what I could of the user tables. Some user account information has been lost permanently.
Some of you may remember similar issues arising in the summer of 2015, the last time my host decided to migrate my site to a new server (also without telling me, also trashing the old server before they made sure everything migrated correctly. Once is unfortunate, twice in a row smacks of gross incompetence, and it's probably time to change hosts.
The wiki seems to be trashed as well. I haven't even started trying to fix that.
In the long run, I have clearly lost the passion for the subject that kept me invested in spending time keeping this forum running smoothly; it may be time to pass the baton on to someone else with regard to running things around here.