A Bit Of A Technical Mishap

from the ooops dept

So, if you've been looking at Techdirt at all over the last three or four hours you may have been a little confused. It's been a long week for me, and I decided that I was going to log off the internet and do some non-Techdirt stuff this evening, but would log on again around midnight to post a few stories before bed. Checked my email when I logged back on and discover that I'm downloading around 150 messages rather than the five to ten that should be expected at this time of night. Something's clearly wrong. Most of the messages are Techdirt error messages. Uh oh. Go to the site, and everything's there... except for the posts themselves (as if they're at all important). Early on, mixed in with all the error alert emails is a huge apology email from Actionweb, the folks who have done a wonderful (seriously) job hosting Techdirt for four and a half years. It seems they made a bit of a mistake, and in moving us to a newer (nicer) server, accidentally deleted our mySQL. They restored a backup, but which was missing all of today's posts since it was done the previous midnight. Along comes Dennis (Techdirt's code junky) to the rescue, realizing each post page is a static HTML page. So, we rescued all the posts, re-entered them all one by one, along with all the comments, and reset the times to match their original post times. Voila. Techdirt back to what it was. Almost. Lost in all of this were any comments that people made yesterday on articles that were older than yesterday. We got all of the comments on articles that were actually posted yesterday, but comments written for older articles were overwritten. Sorry. We also lost any of the submissions that were made between about 7:30 pm (PST) and midnight. If you submitted a story, we're sorry. Submit it again. Anyway, so much for my peaceful evening. I apologize for any inconvenience and thank Dennis for his quick response to my mildly frantic phone call. Actionweb, despite causing the evening's festivities, responded quickly and did what they could as well. They've been so great, responsive, and friendly over all the time that I've used them that I still would recommend them to anyone looking for a hosting service. One screwup in 4.5 years? I think they're allowed.

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