Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - First, let me say that this is not an April Fools joke, though I really really wish it were. And no, it's not a "6 Year Anniversary" joke either. If you were wondering what happened to the site today, here's the scoop from the company that operates the servers I use:
"I hate to say that this is an irrecoverable loss. The datacenter that the dryden server is at in Atlanta had a power failure last night that crashed all servers. Your accounts were on one drive that failed in the crash. Unfortunately we also have lost the backup drive for the server in the crash. This is a terribly unfortunate situation that will be affecting appoximately 10 clients. If you have a site backup you can restore it immediately. We do apologize for this, the chances of losing the 2 drives at once are one in a million."
I have not yet had time to assess which sites were affected, but so far I know my Another Crappy Podcast site, 9th Valkyrie, and a Texas Boy Scout site I host were on this drive. I'll know more later this evening.
I have all the ATF web pages which I can re-upload, but the photo gallery will have to be completely regenerated, which would take days if not weeks. The end result would be a nice fully-updated gallery, so that's kinda a good housecleaning thing.
On the downside, The Pub is gone. I have backups of the database from a year or so ago, so I could always restore back to that level, but I'm not sure I will. Those who know me know I haven't really enjoyed the message board for several years, and I visit it very infrequently. I know there may be some of you out there who really enjoy it or need it as a social outlet. If I hear from enough of you, I will bring a message board back -- completely revised, using modern software that is still being updated (unlike ikonboard which has been stagnent for years, it seems). You can e-mail me at johnpaul@atthefaire.com and tell me why you'd like to see The Pub II.
Other things that are gone include the page counters (ack, over 250,000 visits to the front page!) but I should at least have the 3rd party main page count that's been there since, almost, Day 1.
Long-time visitors may recall when I screwed up my photo gallery back around 2002 (?) and deleted all the photos I'd taken that year. It crushed me. I had low-res backups on the website, which explains why the 2002 photos in the gallery are all lower-rez and watermarked. Oddly, this time I don't really know how I feel. I haven't been much in to this place in so long, other than posting some pictures now and then or some news updates, so I'm not sure what that means.
I'll try to get the old ATF pages re-uploaded soon, but my first priority is figuring out which of the 100 or so accounts hosting with me were affected.
-- Allen in Des Moines