Blank Forums / Posts Missing?

[CheatAreZee]

Jul 27, 2010 10:00:48 GMT -8 Lexxa said:

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!

Hi,

Can you create a new topic on support in regard to this issue? Provide the URL of the forum, and what topic you're trying to move and to which section you're trying to move it to. We'll be able to test it out there and see what may be causing the issue

[Pharmerphil]

Just sent you a pm Ricky..thanks

[Time]

According to this.. all forums were suppose to have a backup in July, but my forum's back up seems to have been like June 30? Because that was the latest post that I can see.
pokemon4ever14.proboards.com/index.cgi

[Time]

Don't worry about this now I guess, I remember my last post so we're just going to start off there.

[bynbynbyn]

Is there a link to find out how to back up our boards ourselves? Is that something we can do when we change something or do we just wait for proboards to do it? Just curious b/c someone said earlier we should back up our own if we are worried about crashes and I wasn't sure how.

Thanks for the info so far!

[MattSlow]

Let me first of all thank you for many years of great free hosting and friendly service. But I cannot accept the fact one month of hard work is being lost. Also, my forum does contain a lot of unique information which would be lost.

I would like to ask you politely for our database so I can move to another place and a different software. I don't mind keeping the old forum as is, it always has been a good place. But one backup per month is nothing coming even close to secure, sorry.

mattslow.proboards.com/

[Martyn Dale]

Im going to reply to a couple of points.

Firstly, i think part of the issue here is that some people did not read the thread. Questions were asked that had already been answered.

With regards to the harddrive. It failed with 0 warning. No degradation of performance, no SMART warnings, no reports of bad clusters, nothing.

We actually monitor for things like that. From the point of the first indication, I didnt even have time to connect to the server before the drive was totally dead (dead to the point it was not even detectable from the BIOS). That is from normal operation to total failure in less than one minute.

As was stated by a member in this thread, this DOES happen, even organizations such as Google have had this issue. They are just larger, so you are less likely to be the one affected.

On the note of why the backup data was not within 1 week, this has already been addressed. There were performance issues on forums. A short term decision needed to be made. Give everyone lousy performance, or forgo backups for a couple of weeks. The latter was chosen while replacement systems were put in place.

There have even been threads here in the last couple of days questioning why their forum had been backed up twice in 1 week. That was the new system rolling out. It was unfortunate that the issue happened when it did, which was in fact DURING the backup cycle. This is why some people did not notice any data loss, and why the latest date for some was the the 26th.

3 hours later, and there would have been only data loss of a couple of hours. That is how close things were.

We are truly sorry that this issue happened. As Patrick has stated, we will take from this what we can and make further improvements where possible.

[ljh]

Thanks for the clarification, Martyn. Regarding things to learn from this, perhaps investigating secure mechanisms to allow forum admins to create full local backups when they require might be a useful step?

As I said in my first post, I have no idea what the total activity level is over the Proboards systems and I suspect that the bandwidth required to allow unrestricted backups by paranoid boards could quickly become prohibitive! But allowing admin to archive their database locally, perhaps offline in maintenance modem, would enable the system to be as robust as individual boards wish.

The individual board administrators could then make decisions on the balance between data security and the resources (represented for them by downtime) required to ensure it.

[Himms]

Kinda sucks that all the July posts have been lost in the system failure. One board I'm part off lost pretty much all of the July posts (some 700 + posts; not that I kept a count of it.). Mind you it's a RPG board, it is sad that we can't recover the posts. One member only had the current mission posts copied and pasted, but anything over this past week and stuff that the member hadn't had access to has been lost.

But i did like to say thank you for restoring the boards as fast as Admins did. Kudos to you all.

Another board I'm part off has had no loss posts wise ....weird. everything is there till the 22nd July. Really odd. LOL

[James [a_leon]]

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.

Easy rookie, harddrives are mechanical, and mechanical devices can fail without any warning at all, although that is uncommon. Just because you've never seen it doesn't mean it can't and doesn't happen .

---

Martyn, Patrick, I must say the way you've handled the situation and the irritable members that have ridiculous standards for a service that is provided for free, was very impressive and I applaud you for it. I'd have a hard time biting my tongue, but if I suppose if in a position like either of you, I suppose handling it in a professional manner would be the best way to go. Just good to see y'all doing that so well.

[ladybird2872]

So, are all of our posts from July gone for good on our message boards? Or will proboards be able to restore the missing July posts on our sites?

I logged into my board and it seems like the last posts are from June?

["Big Guy"]

YES, THE HARD DRIVE CRASHED

YES, THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME!

NO, YOU WILL NOT GET YOUR LOST POSTS BACK!!

NO, YOU MAY NOT HAVE A CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE!!!

HOLY COW... CAN ANYONE READ?

Thanks ProBoards! Good job, great response time, thank you for your mostly dependable servers and service!

Now, can someone PLEASE lock this thread before someone else asks for a cookie?

[red]Please don't use such big letters. -Patrick[/red]

[Himms]

Jul 27, 2010 19:26:04 GMT -8 "Big Guy" said:

NO, YOU WILL NOT GET YOUR LOST POSTS BACK!!

Then how do you explain this site having no loss of posts during the crash?

www.gatekerys.proboards.com/index.cgi

[James [a_leon]]

Jul 27, 2010 20:13:11 GMT -8 Himms said:

Jul 27, 2010 19:26:04 GMT -8 "Big Guy" said:

NO, YOU WILL NOT GET YOUR LOST POSTS BACK!!

Then how do you explain this site having no loss of posts during the crash?

www.gatekerys.proboards.com/index.cgi

Do you not know how to read?

Jul 27, 2010 15:22:51 GMT -8 Martyn Dale said:

There have even been threads here in the last couple of days questioning why their forum had been backed up twice in 1 week. That was the new system rolling out. It was unfortunate that the issue happened when it did, which was in fact DURING the backup cycle. This is why some people did not notice any data loss, and why the latest date for some was the the 26th.

3 hours later, and there would have been only data loss of a couple of hours. That is how close things were.

^ That's how. I've even bolded the key word for you, since caps weren't enough, and italicized the rest.

[Himms]

Jul 27, 2010 20:19:12 GMT -8 James [a_leon] said:

Jul 27, 2010 20:13:11 GMT -8 Himms said:

Then how do you explain this site having no loss of posts during the crash?

www.gatekerys.proboards.com/index.cgi

Do you not know how to read?

Jul 27, 2010 15:22:51 GMT -8 Martyn Dale said:

There have even been threads here in the last couple of days questioning why their forum had been backed up twice in 1 week. That was the new system rolling out. It was unfortunate that the issue happened when it did, which was in fact DURING the backup cycle. This is why some people did not notice any data loss, and why the latest date for some was the the 26th.

3 hours later, and there would have been only data loss of a couple of hours. That is how close things were.

^ That's how. I've even bolded the key word for you, since caps weren't enough, and italicized the rest.

Ah ops I guess I missed that part of post when I read it. My bad.

Sorry!!