Forum Posts missing....

[DocHolladay]

All of the posts made in July are missing. Below is the answer that Proboards admin gave for why it happened. The hard drive has been replaced and they are working to the missing posts back up. Please be patient.

We are running some tests on the hard drive that appears to have failed to see if we can recover the data from it. If we are not able to recover the data we will restore from our backup server.

Regardless we will be having a new hard drive installed on this server which will result in some downtime.

In the event that we need to restore from backups, we have a backup of all active forums from July. Forums restored using this method will be reverted to their July backup which may be anywhere from July 1st to July 27th.

Read more: support.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=support&action=display&thread=363914&page=1#ixzz0uwG6woJs

[DocHolladay]

Update...

I quoted the first reply that gave me an answer to why the posts are missing. Now, after reading through several pages of questions and answers from the Proboards Admin, it appears that the missing posts arent coming back. That is just from reading the replies that the admin is giving to everyone that is in the same boat we are. IF I see anything different, I will post it.

[DocHolladay]

One more...

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.

Read more: support.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=support&action=display&thread=363914&page=6#ixzz0uwO9OEgQ

[bigblue]

Thanks for the info Doc! This system has been very reliable in the past, so much so that it is taken for granted that it will always be up and running. Not a huge problem by any means.
Don