Blank Forums / Posts Missing?

[apollo08]

My forum still has posts ending with the June 30, 2010 posts. The url is:

laurie25.proboards.com/index.cgi

Any idea if and when the posts through July 26th can be restored? Sorry for bothering you so much.

Thanks!

[VS Admin]

Jul 27, 2010 3:51:04 GMT -8 ketara said:

oywrpg4.proboards.com/index.cgi

Your forum was restored to the state it was in on July 1st at 2:59am Central time, you just didn't have any posts made in the first couple hours of the day.

Patrick

[Martyn Dale]

Once your forum is accessible again, the state it came back with is the state that we have. If it comes back online missing 2 weeks worth of posts for example, unfortunately there will be no change after that point.

[VS Admin]

Jul 27, 2010 3:55:32 GMT -8 apollo08 said:

My forum still has posts ending with the June 30, 2010 posts. The url is:

laurie25.proboards.com/index.cgi

Any idea if and when the posts through July 26th can be restored? Sorry for bothering you so much.

Thanks!

Sorry, but literally the hard drive failed and thus we restored from our backups. What is on your forum is the most recent copy of data that we have for you.

Patrick

[consigliere1]

Jul 27, 2010 3:49:22 GMT -8 VS Admin said:

I would need your forum URL to verify, but every forum that I have checked to this point has been a backup from July 1st onward.

My boards have no backup since June 30th. Check it out at:
corleonecompound.proboards.com

[Imprintation]

Thank for everything, it has helped incredibly.

[VS Admin]

Jul 27, 2010 3:57:14 GMT -8 consigliere1 said:

Jul 27, 2010 3:49:22 GMT -8 VS Admin said:

I would need your forum URL to verify, but every forum that I have checked to this point has been a backup from July 1st onward.

My boards have no backup since June 30th. Check it out at:
corleonecompound.proboards.com

Your forum was restored to July 1st, at 3:00am Central time, which is just a few hours away from June 30th. It is possible that no posts were made in that time frame.

[jennissw]

Many thanks for keeping everyone informed. Lost posts are lost. Life goes on.

Thanks for all the updates

[ketara]

So am I to understand that proboards runs its product in such a way that a single hard drive crash can cause data loss, and even given that only backs its data up every 30 days?

I've been using proboards for running play by email games for close to 5 years now, but that's a pretty shoddy way of doing things in my opinion. I keep better safeguards on the data in my home computer.

I am not sure how my game will be able to cope with 27 days chopped off the forums, and very sure I won't be using proboards for my next project if this sort of accident can actually happen.

Thanks for being so on the ball about a reply, at least.

[VS Admin]

Jul 27, 2010 4:08:43 GMT -8 ketara said:

So am I to understand that proboards runs its product in such a way that a single hard drive crash can cause data loss, and even given that only backs its data up every 30 days?

I've been using proboards for running play by email games for close to 5 years now, but that's a pretty shoddy way of doing things in my opinion. I keep better safeguards on the data in my home computer.

I am not sure how my game will be able to cope with 27 days chopped off the forums, and very sure I won't be using proboards for my next project if this sort of accident can actually happen.

Thanks for being so on the ball about a reply, at least.

We do run weekly backups on data, however due to server load issues we opted to delay a couple of backups to keep forums loading at appropriate speeds. We finished reworking our backup system earlier this week to provide for a more fluid backup process that would not affect server load times as much.

The timing of this event is unfortunate, however as a free service I think that we are still going above and beyond in regards to this situation and we have our staff up all night continuing to work to restore every bit of data that we can.

Patrick

[ketara]

Just because the proboards service is free to myself, does not mean that proboards is not collecting a profit off of the ad revenue that activity garnered from my work on said forum generates.

I wish I had been notified that you were opting to delay backups, I could have made my own local backups in that event. However, I just assumed that my forums were being handled with appropriate care. Apparently I shouldn't make those assumptions.

I do appreciate that you guys are up working late, but I am now faced with a pretty serious problem that a simple email could have fixed.

[kirstym]

Thanks for restoring the boards quickly. Luckily this was a slow month so we haven't lost all that much.

Out of curiosity, is there I way I can personally back up our forum onto my own computer? Just as a safety net?

[VS Admin]

Jul 27, 2010 4:20:39 GMT -8 ketara said:

Just because the proboards service is free to myself, does not mean that proboards is not collecting a profit off of the ad revenue that activity garnered from my work on said forum generates.

I wish I had been notified that you were opting to delay backups, I could have made my own local backups in that event. However, I just assumed that my forums were being handled with appropriate care. Apparently I shouldn't make those assumptions.

I do appreciate that you guys are up working late, but I am now faced with a pretty serious problem that a simple email could have fixed.

While I respect your opinion here, we make every effort to ensure that our systems run smoothly and part of that may be making administrative choices in regards to our systems. We simply cannot notify every forum owner anytime a change is made or if a delay in a backup happens. Further, our Terms of Service is explicitly clear that we recommend you backup your own data.

We will take what lessons we can from tonight and use it to further improve our service for the future.

Patrick

[VS Admin]

Jul 27, 2010 4:29:03 GMT -8 kirstym said:

Thanks for restoring the boards quickly. Luckily this was a slow month so we haven't lost all that much.

Out of curiosity, is there I way I can personally back up our forum onto my own computer? Just as a safety net?

An easy way to backup your own posts is to go to your profile and use the "View Latest Posts" feature. You can type in a number up to 1,000 and then when the page loads just right click / save. This will save all your posts to one file.

Patrick

[VS Admin]

Just an update, we have all forums A through S restored, currently finishing off the letter T. Over 80% of active forums that were on this drive are back online and we expect the rest to finish within an hour.