Yesterdays Server Crash - Please Read

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Posted July 21, 2010

I am making this a mandatory read as I am getting a lot of PM's from people asking if they did something wrong as some posts that were made recently and some people's PM's have vanished. I did not intentionally delete these or anything like that so please do not assume I did as I am getting angry PM's from people who think I did this intentionally.

This is NOT something we on purpose.

The site had a major crash yesterday (July 20th 2010) and we lost some data but were able to restore most of the data and get the site back online for everyone.

We had a hard drive fail earlier in the week and to make a long story short... this messed up the database that runs cerb.

I thought we had it all fixed and sorted out and back on a new drive... but it was not 100% ... turns out we did not have the problem fixed completely as the albums part of the site had another crash yesterday and we almost lost all the ladies photos.

I fixed this but in turn had to restore the site using a a backup of the database from the previous night (so some posts during the day were lost and some people got noticed for PM's they had already read - everyone had to log back in and it was just a giant mess)

The problem why I can not restore PM's was the backup file was not saving as a complete backup (only a partial backup as the error in the picture table was stopping the backup) so unfortunately some people have lost some PM's and Posts.

I have tried my best to restore the PM's and Posts that I could salvage (all others I regret to say have been lost).

Many of you store pm's on the site (I do it too and it's a bad habit but I do understand many of you don't want to store this info in other places) I am taking extra steps to ensure the backup database dumps are complete each night so we can avoid this in the future. I have also removed the photos from the database and placed them in a folder on the server (Making the database smaller so this should also help). This was not done previously as it caused a security risk but that risk is no longer an issue so hopefully this stops the same problem from happening in the future.