IMFDB:Blog Post/March 13, 2008

Let there be backups!

Ok, I've installed ruby on our dedicated server, signed up for Amazon's s3 storage service, and customized a ruby backup script to automatically backup the database and all image files at 4am pst and upload them to our s3 folder. The process really bogs down the box for a good 10 minutes, so I'm thinking once every 24 hours is fine, but I may go to once every 12 hours eventually... Thanks for putting up with the ups and downs during this time of transition.

Best, Chris bunni 05:17, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

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This is truly ridiculous...how could such idiocy possibly occur? I lost not only my account, but all of the work I did. I put in so much time to improve this site and work on pages, only to see all my work lost by incompetence. Clearly, you people are not responsible enough to properly back things up, so I can no longer trust you with my contributions. I will no longer be contributing to this site.

My sincerest apologies

Your feelings are completely warranted, and I can only offer my deepest apologies. I will be posting our new backup procedures and details on the dedicated servers I am in the process of purchasing and bringing live shortly. You trusted me with your work and I let you down, for this I am truly sorry. All I can do is assure you that we have learned from our mistakes and an event such as this will never happen again. WikiSysop 10:37, 14 March 2008 (PDT)

Welcome to our new server! This is the first of many steps I am taking to ensure we never lose data again. The site used to be hosted on shared hosting overseas - we now have a dedicated server housed in a colocation in San Jose, CA. Dedicated servers don't come cheap, but your time, effort, and contributions are now my number one priority.

I'm still transferring the images that have been uploaded over the last couple days, don't worry they're not lost!

Very Bad Things have happened. Our main server went down as well as our secondary server which was housing the daily backups. The last backup file we were able to successfully access was from December 21, 2007. I am heartbroken to say we have lost the last 10 weeks worth of edits - I don't know what to say to all the users except that I am incredibly saddened by the loss of all of our efforts and that I will take all steps in my power to make sure this never happens again. Now - all of your work from the last 10 weeks is not lost! If you know a page you worked on is missing go to google and search imfdb.org along with the name of the page you want back, for example "imfdb.org Terminator 2" and you will most likely find google still has a cached copy! Click on the "cached" link in the bottom of the listing and you'll be able to copy the text! Now, the screenshots for the last 10 weeks are completely gone - and I am going to do my absolute best to create new screenshots for as many pages as is humanly possible. I'm still uploading screenshots from the backup so you'll notice a lot of broken images for the time being.

Also, all users who have joined in the last 10 weeks have lost their accounts - please sign up again! And if you know a page you created or worked on is gone please search for it in google and recreate the page with the cached text.

If you don't want to go to all that trouble, just leave a note on my talk page with the page that is missing and I'll do all the legwork and get new screenshots!

Also - I'm working my a** off downloading as many pages still in the google cache as possible - you'll start seeing those show up later tonight.

I'm so sorry guys - I'm going to make this right. WikiSysop 18:51, 13 March 2008 (PDT)