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[J∃§§i⊄∀]

my forum: catluvy.proboards.com

Could you tell me when my last backup was made? I don't appear to be missing any threads, so I'm a little confused. Maybe I was just lucky...

[ljh]

Jul 27, 2010 6:37:29 GMT -8 Misspresh said:

Previous comments about hard-drives just failing without knowledge is absolutely rubbish, there are signs no matter what, all three previous hard-drive failures of mine gave errors no matter what, though granted to the untrained eye they would have been dismissed.

Previous comments about hard drives "just failing" really aren't rubbish.

I speak with about 18 years experience in hardware repair and degree level knowledge of both hardware and software (large system) engineering. The fact that all three failures you've personally experienced gave prior symptoms really isn't a statistically significant.

For a little more reliable statistics, try this 2007 study from Pinheiro, Weber and Barroso [Google.inc] which found about 36% of failures on a very large sample occurred with no SMART warning.

Now, some of those may have given physical warnings like vibration or noise that might be notced on a home PC but are you really suggesting that a large server cluster should have someone going round putting their ears to the cases 24/7 to see if they're noiser than usual???

The bottom line is that, unless you're in a contracted relationship that guarantees 100% data security (which will be a paid service - and an expensive one at that) then ensuring against loss is your responsibility, and yours alone.


*** edited to correct broken link ***

[mireilleg]

With all the negative reactions here, I just really felt the need to log in and thank the staff for their quick action and restore as many data as they could. Must have been a bucketload of work. It sucks some is gone, but hey, that's life.

Thanks proboards support!

[mirraseiadmn]

Thank you for the quick action, as well. It's still mildly depressing that we lost ten pages of a serious exchange, but it was barely a night and this is free, afterall. In any case, I'm certainly taking advantage of that 1000 posts deal from now on.

[Misspresh]

Jul 27, 2010 7:08:10 GMT -8 ljh said:

Now, some of those may have given physical warnings like vibration or noise that might be noticed on a home PC but are you really suggesting that a large server cluster should have someone going round putting their ears to the cases 24/7 to see if they're noiser than usual???

Actually my comment wasn't regarding a home PC at all, but actual datacenter hardware. With data centers, there are all sorts of measures put in place in case of failure. Even something as simple as a temperature gauge can give a warning sign that something is amiss.

True there are some ways which data centers themselves cause problems, such as moving a perfectly good server from one side of a room to another, in which case the servers are to be monitored during the move and reboot.

[ljh]

Apologies for broken link in my last post, hopefully this one will play better:

static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en//papers/disk_failures.pdf

One interesting (and counter-intuitive) point from the study was that operating temperature has very little effect on failure rates other than cold ones being more likely to fail than hot, until you get to very hot (over about 45 degrees C)!

[mireilleg]

Jul 27, 2010 7:53:37 GMT -8 LOL what do i put here? said:

why don't you guys have weekly backups to prevent members from losing a huge amount of data?

That was answered already earlier in this thread:

Jul 27, 2010 4:12:40 GMT -8 VS Admin said:

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

[LIVEnSPIRALS]

Konaha

What about this board? Is that one of the ones you just opt to delay? For nearly a whole month?

[Lexxa]

the users on my board ( fanficcorner.proboards.com/ ) still report that threads/posts are missing. I am confused, can we do anything about this, or does ALL of the content on there that has been lost needs to be re-posted?

[Pharmerphil]

What about new members?
The last few we had join are now gone then?

[dawncf]

We had also purchased and applied credits to make the forum ad-free and it seems we have lost these as well. How can we get our ad-free status back without having to purchase further credits? We had not used all of our page views for July.

[Pharmerphil]

Oh yeah, that too...thanks for reminding me Dawncf

[CheatAreZee]

Hi,

Unfortunately, any posts or registered members that were created after the day of the backup on your forum cannot be restored at this point in time. Basically brings your forum back to the day it was backed up on.

If you can PM me the google order number for the ad-free, we'll be able to refund the credits to the forum

[nitro76]

We lost all of the posts made in July on this site.

xenoahsark.proboards.com

I hope this can be fixed.

Thanks Rick

[Lexxa]

Several topics were started on my board adressing this problem, in different sections and I seem to not be able to move them. It gives me an error saying I didn't select any folders from the drop-down menu, when in fac, I did...?
A bug needing a fix, maybe?

thank you in advance for your help!