- Apr 29, 2021
- 709
- 122
No doubt, this is gonna be number one asked question in next coming, days, weeks, and possibly months. Let me first start off by saying how extremely sorry I am to the GD.com community. Words could not come close in describing that feeling in the pit of my stomach when I realized the gravity of what transpired during the week of April 21st, 2021. I will give you the full details as to what happened, and what I have done to prevent this from happening again.
On April 21st, 2021, I received a call from @sndsamplr that the site was down. I had just landed in Florida to spend a few days with my parents when I got the call. I told samplr I was on it.
I had my laptop with me and tried to remote access into the server. I could not get in. I placed a call to the tech support of our hosting company to see if they could reach the server. The guy on the phone said that he could access the server, but one of the hard disks was giving a high temperature reading and shutting down the server. I asked the guy if the OS was fully booting up before shutting down and he told me it was.
I told the guy, it was ok to replace the primary hard drive in the server, and to mount it in the server as the third drive (our server has two hard drives, and adding a new blank primary drive made 3 drives).
They told me they'd email me when they had the new primary drive installed.
The next day, April 22nd, I received an email stating that the new hard drive was in and that I could reinstall the operating system. I initiated a remote OS installation, and received an email about an hour later stating the install had failed. I contacted technical support again and they said the new hard drive as also over heating and they believed that the server itself was faulty (not the hard drives). They then moved our hard drives to a new server. In doing so, they put the original drives back in their original slots in the new server and emailed me the unthinkable. They told me I could re-install the OS.
Anyone who knows anything about computers, knows that when you reinstall a linux operating system, it overwrites the existing data. So the install goes fine and I'm unaware that I just overwrote the original hard drive (which stored all the data). After installation, I could not access the secondary hard drive. The secondary hard drive holds all the photos and user uploads, as where the primary hard drive holds the database.
I contacted technical support, and they enabled the secondary drive. When I remote access in, I'm expecting to see the original hard drive as the secondary drive in order to backup the database. What I saw sent a chill and panic down my spine. I realized I was looking at the original secondary hard drive. I contacted technical support and asked them where the primary drive was? They told me the technician had put it back in its original spot because they realized it was a server issue and not a hard drive issue.
I thought to myself ok, no worries because the original drive made a data backup to the secondary drive every week. I went to get the data backup, and IT WASN'T THERE... WTF? Oh fuck me! Shit piss mother fucker, oh no this isn't happening!!!!!
When I realized there was no backup, a chill ran down my spine, and the most sickening feeling in my gut ensued. The final blow had been delivered. 20 years of GD.com data...........gone!!
Is there any good news from this?
Maybe. Because the secondary drive was not corrupted and still has the data intact, I have access to everyone's photo's and avatars. The issue is that they're named based on what your member number was. All the photos, when they're uploaded get renamed to a name that contained the forum number, post number and date and time, and nothing containing the original file number. So if you know your old member id, I can get your avatar and photos.
In order to prevent this type of failure in the future, all data get's backed up from the site to another (remote) server.
I am truly sorry to everyone.
FNG
On April 21st, 2021, I received a call from @sndsamplr that the site was down. I had just landed in Florida to spend a few days with my parents when I got the call. I told samplr I was on it.
I had my laptop with me and tried to remote access into the server. I could not get in. I placed a call to the tech support of our hosting company to see if they could reach the server. The guy on the phone said that he could access the server, but one of the hard disks was giving a high temperature reading and shutting down the server. I asked the guy if the OS was fully booting up before shutting down and he told me it was.
I told the guy, it was ok to replace the primary hard drive in the server, and to mount it in the server as the third drive (our server has two hard drives, and adding a new blank primary drive made 3 drives).
They told me they'd email me when they had the new primary drive installed.
The next day, April 22nd, I received an email stating that the new hard drive was in and that I could reinstall the operating system. I initiated a remote OS installation, and received an email about an hour later stating the install had failed. I contacted technical support again and they said the new hard drive as also over heating and they believed that the server itself was faulty (not the hard drives). They then moved our hard drives to a new server. In doing so, they put the original drives back in their original slots in the new server and emailed me the unthinkable. They told me I could re-install the OS.
Anyone who knows anything about computers, knows that when you reinstall a linux operating system, it overwrites the existing data. So the install goes fine and I'm unaware that I just overwrote the original hard drive (which stored all the data). After installation, I could not access the secondary hard drive. The secondary hard drive holds all the photos and user uploads, as where the primary hard drive holds the database.
I contacted technical support, and they enabled the secondary drive. When I remote access in, I'm expecting to see the original hard drive as the secondary drive in order to backup the database. What I saw sent a chill and panic down my spine. I realized I was looking at the original secondary hard drive. I contacted technical support and asked them where the primary drive was? They told me the technician had put it back in its original spot because they realized it was a server issue and not a hard drive issue.
I thought to myself ok, no worries because the original drive made a data backup to the secondary drive every week. I went to get the data backup, and IT WASN'T THERE... WTF? Oh fuck me! Shit piss mother fucker, oh no this isn't happening!!!!!
When I realized there was no backup, a chill ran down my spine, and the most sickening feeling in my gut ensued. The final blow had been delivered. 20 years of GD.com data...........gone!!
Is there any good news from this?
Maybe. Because the secondary drive was not corrupted and still has the data intact, I have access to everyone's photo's and avatars. The issue is that they're named based on what your member number was. All the photos, when they're uploaded get renamed to a name that contained the forum number, post number and date and time, and nothing containing the original file number. So if you know your old member id, I can get your avatar and photos.
In order to prevent this type of failure in the future, all data get's backed up from the site to another (remote) server.
I am truly sorry to everyone.
FNG
