Wanted to make a public apology for the down time. Approx 8pm EST Saturday night, MF was hit with a hard drive failure... completely fried so they say. I have the hard disk drive going overnight to a specialty company that claims they have 80% or more success rate salvaging data. Costs will be anywhere from $200-$4000 to save it... I'll be sending Supergenii the bill, no worries. In the interim, we have brought you back in time to approx the end of January, which is when our last backup was fortunately (or unfortunately) made. I hope to be able to save the last two months of posts, etc. and get them merged into the existing posts so nothing will be lost. We will also be upgrading to the latest Vbulletin this week and doing a lot of changes, enhancements while our hole is already dug, so we come through shining in the end. If you had registered after January 18th (approx) you will unfortunately need to register again, with our apologies. If you were given PH access after then, please PM me and we'll get you back on track. Again, apologies all around, and a special thanks to NYMailer who saved the day, and is helping us with the proper and correct path moving forward which will include daily auto backups so this type of thing never happens again, increased security measures, etc. We will be rock solid when we come out of this mess, rest assured. Thanks to Lolito who did the actual backup end of January, if he hadn't, and the hard drive had come back unrestorable, two years worth of memories (good and bad) would have been forever lost. I am grateful they're still preserved! We'll update this thread as we move forward, step by step. Thanks again for your patience during this difficult time!
Just a quick note - if you go the direction of merging recovered DB with the currently-current one you might want to give some thought to proper renumbering of the new posts. The post-restore post ID (like this one for example) are obviously going to duplicate the ones in the lost DB.
All they'd have to do is make the post-crash post IDs higher than the highest pre-crash ID, then update every relevant table.
Good news, I've heard back from the data recovery company, just the heads were shot, they think the entire actual disk surface is fine, so we're proceeding with the restoration and should have it back in a few days....
Yup, exactly. Hopefully VBuletin won't get too screwed up by post renumberings. Sometimes there are dependencies on those IDs... Maybe the best way to go would be to start with the old/recovered DB and just import "new" posts under new IDs.
I've heard back from the hard drive company and they have said, much to my surprise and regret, the hard drive cannot be restored. The heads did too much damage apparently. I tried my best. We're upgrading to vBulletin today and will be making many changes to MF.. please refrain from posting until we're finished if that's possible., you'll just be too frustrated trying to get through as we add tons of enhancements and make changes. We should be back to full operation by Mon-Tue of next week at which point we'll make another announcement.. thanks for your patience!
Some parts of it are ok, others are not.. we'll be adjusting shortly. Bear with us, major changes will be happening tomorrow as we get this template more organized. if anybody has a WISH list in terms of add on modules or something theyd like to have, now is the time to ask. We will be working tomorrow throughout the weekend getting this place in tip top shape!
If you can add "TOP 10 last post" module like in the old template ? Thats very useful when you don't have the time to check categories one by one.
Was wondering why my login wasn't working, should've had nightly cron backups man. And while most HDD recovery is expensive most in-home tools you can obtain usually can get back data pretty easily, just depends on health of the drive I suppose.4 I had an HDD which wouldn't spin up at all and I managed to repair it after a week just long enough to get the data off it, that was back when I was 15 or so I made the mistake of having my mom ship one of the old drives I had to me and she didn't pack it properly. All in all it sucks but it happens to the best of us.
Aww that's not nice, Like I said though it happens to the best of us. I've had several crashes without backups ( Complete failure, keeping your backups on the same HDD as your DB my worst mistake). That and just recently forgot the password to one of my truecrypt drives, and I can't even get into my old ironkey because I forgot the password to that as well. Scary thing about ironkey(s) they self destruct with too many in-valid attempts.
I've been using 'crashplan.com' to backup my shit.. I've queued up 16tb backed up 4tb so far.. I don't understand why their shit is so slow, I'm running the backup from 2 bonded 1 gigabit connections but it peaks at like 60mbps..
Is there any chance to see the forum in old look? With new design it's now almost impossible to read, especially the threads listings. Actually the old look was also usable only after good portion of custom browser adjustments, but now it is disaster.
Can you please elaborate a bit? I went with more blah blah colors and showed a dozen or more people and they all preferred the original skin we were on before (this one), What is hard to read exactly? The blue color of the font? We can make that black if that helps.. can you please me more specific exactly...
You trust your valuable data in the hands of others? Please tell me it's at least got some kind of encryption only you have the key for and they don't insert such into their DB(s) or anything on their side.
There are actually pretty much disturbing things to name and if I'm the only one who doesn't like them, then I'd better tolerate them than causing drama. But yes, it's too much light blue in fonts and in background, too low contrast between background and fonts in the threads listings, including light grey fonts, the thread names would look better in more bold fonts, the forum in general is very hard to use on small screens (netbook for instance), and some other things but if I'm the only one, who cares.
Daansen, While nobody can ever design something so 100% like it, I have left the option for you to change the skin to the vb default at the very bottom of the page.. try that, it makes everything completely bland but might be what you want...
