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PLEASE READ: Down time, technical issues and data loss

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HundredProofSam

Hi guys,

 

As you all have probably noticed, IVG was down for a long time recently, and once we got it back up and running, the forums only came back with posts up until July 2018. So let me go over what went wrong and where we stand.

 

What went down

 

The down time was down to a billing issue that led to disruption of our AWS services. When the issue was sorted and our services were reinstated by AWS, for some reason the forums didn't come back online.

 

IPB (the forum platform we use) tech support said that we had initiated a forum software upgrade but that upgrade was not complete (which is weird because no upgrade was initiated by us). As a result, we had to manually upgrade the forums as there was no way to just switch back to the old version.

 

After the upgrade, it turned out that all content post-July 2018 had vanished. Tech support said the only way to get that back is by restoring an old database backup. Unfortunately, we are set up for daily rotational backups, which means today's back up will overwrite yesterdays. So the backup we have is also without post-July 2018 data.

 

Where we stand

 

So as things stand, we have lost a year's worth of posts and threads, and any users who registered over the last year will have to register again.

 

@sathyabhat has suggested that going forward we keep daily back ups and separate monthly backups. This will help ensure that something like this doesn't happen again.

 

Had the billing issue not occurred (which is my fault) this would have been avoided, but it still doesn't explain how one year's worth of data got wiped off or how a forum upgrade could have been initiated, since in the past only I have done the upgrades. I think Sathya might be able to shed some more light on the technical aspect of this but I think even he can't figure out how that content disappeared.

 

Regardless, it looks like we'll have to rebuild some of the popular threads from over the last year, as well as the trading threads and feedback. Sorry about that.

 

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