Status of site restoration 8/9

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gmiller
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Status of site restoration 8/9

Post by gmiller » Mon Aug 09, 2010 11:10 pm

The website crashed on 7/31 early in the morning due to a hard drive failure. This crash was before the daily backup ran, so there was no backup of data until the previous day (7/30). I was able to eventually get on the server and pull the most critical files off, so that a day's worth of data would not be lost. Unfortunately even though I was able to successfully pull down the "games" database, it was corrupted. After trying for some time to repair it, I finally gave up and used the backup. So you may notice some moves you made are not registered.

Fortunately the day of data lost was a Saturday, which is one of the slower days on the site, so hopefully most of you won't notice anything missing.

The database containing all of the archived games was corrupt and unrepairable. But a daily backup of the archive table isn't made, only weekly backups are, so the archives will be restored from a backup done on 7/25, so you may notice several games missing. I haven't actually made the restored archives available on-line yet but they will be soon.

I've actually moved the website to a new server, rather than restoring the website on the old server. Which is a pretty nice side effect of this disaster, I had been wanting to upgrade but dreaded all of the work required. And it's actually cheaper ($63/mo rather than $80/mo). It's faster and has more memory. Also has two hard drives with more storage, so I can backup data to the second drive and have a more resilient backup strategy when (not if) one of the hard drives fail in the future.

So, in all, I think we're actually better off than before.

There was a lot of reconfiguration that had to be done, and some more that still has to be done. If you receive an error when trying to do something, please post in the forum in the "General Forum" section. Please make the error you're reporting obvious from the title, and please check the forum to make sure you're not re-reporting an issue someone else has already brought to my attention. If you try to e-mail me, I'll end up with a thousand e-mails saying the same thing. Also my e-mail goes through this server, and still hasn't been restored to 100% of its former self, so there's a higher than normal chance I won't get your e-mail.

I have added 14 days of time to every game to make up for the time the server was down. That's about twice the time the server was actually down, so it should be sufficient.
Greg Miller

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