Hard drive crash

Not here, not on my computer (touch wood) but on the server that hosted drumandbass.ro, supermagnet.ro, 4elemente.ro, Deea’s blog and probably many other sites.

I don’t know anything about Deea because I haven’t yet spoken with her and I don’t remember if WordPress had any push button backup feature and so I’m a little afraid. Although Google’s cache can be of tremendous help in situations like this (hint!). Lucian from Supermagnet said that he made backups frequently so he’s off the list of the badly affected.

The bad news is that drumandbass.ro was last backed up sometime at the beginning of October right after I installed the forum attachment mod. We were analizing the different scenarios with the guys from the crew today, but I’m still hoping for at least a partial recovery… I should have suspected something was wrong because two nights ago the forum suddenly stopped working and displayed weird errors. I managed to repair it uploading the necessary files from the October backup but it was truely strange and unexplainable because only two people (Lucian and myself) have the password for the FTP and none of us logged in lately. And so came today’s morning. When I went online the site was already offline but the news of the hard drive crash came only later from a guy who was in contact with the webmaster of 4elemente.ro which at his turn probably called the hosting company to find out what’s wrong.

Let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best.

UPDATE 1: December 19, 2004 - Hooray! The FTP is server back and the files seem OK. Can’t connect to the database yet. We’re waiting for some info from Reea.

UPDATE 2: December 20, 2004 - I just finished uploading the 70 megabyte backup file that dates back to October. So for the moment the rest is up to the Reea boys. Probably tonight or early tomorrow morning drumandbass.ro will emerge as if it was frozen in time for 2 months. Let this be a leason to do those damn backups more often…

UPDATE 3: December 20, 2004 - The guys from Reea put up a temporary index page explaining exactly what happened and what to expect. I submitted a support ticket and I’m waiting for an answer, which I’ll probably get tomorrow.

UPDATE 4: December 21, 2004 - The site was put back online today using that backup. There’s a lot of work ahead of us to put back some of the content we lost. Unfortunately hundreds of forum messages are gone for good. But there’s nothing to be done now, life goes on…

Posted in: technical.

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