This is very strange indeed as it was already posted on the Fan Faire forums. But I did get this off of EQ2 Traders.
Created By: Niami Denmother
January 04, 2012 - Site Update
My apologies for the silence over the holidays, as I was hoping against hope that we would have a happier update, or a rough ETA, before I posted. Neither has happened, so here is all I can tell you.
As many of you were aware, we had some serious site downtimes at the beginning of December. After much gnashing of teeth, whimpering and moaning on our part, our hosting provider found the issue. We were told that it was a controller failure, and that our sites had been moved to another server.
There was just one problem.
They restored us to the last full backup, apparently from mid-October.
You can guess what my blood pressure did at that point if you think about what has happened in EQ and EQ2 since that time.
We were told that they were working recovering the rest of the data before the holidays hit.
After a couple weeks of silence due to holiday absenteeism, we were told today that the "entire blade" was shipped to a data recovery expert, and that there was no ETA, but the expectation of a full recovery.
No more gnashing of teeth - it is giving me migraines. No more whimpering, unless they're deep primal whimpers. I am just sort of watching my hope at seeing the lost data any time soon dwindle into nothingness. Keep the faith for me if you can, while I try to just push the stress from my mind for a bit?
For those who are wondering why this is so stressful, here is what that 2 months of lost data entails:
EQ
Untold amounts of expansion-related data entry by our hard-working volunteers - recipes, items, spawn information, etc.
Underlying database updates by the hubbyogre to fields, etc. so that said data entry could proceed. (I had to impinge on his final day of vacation on Monday to have him redo all the changes he'd done, since I had given up hope on the restore)
EQII
The Nights of the Dead preview, story, and all associated images
The expansion preview and story, and all supporting articles and images (other than the apprentice information, which is echoed in the undamaged forums)
All the housing guide updates by Therendil, plus the prestige housing article
The Frostfell preview/story, and all associated images (thankfully, we had a fabulous volunteer working on redoing my cobbled together Frostfell images, so I can run with those, when I find motivation to tackle this mess
Some things, like the item/recipe information on the EQ side, can be redone with a lot of hard work. Other things, like my previews and stories, absolutely cannot be recreated without that restore, due to my habit of composing directly into the site editor.
Anything we do on either site to articles or the EQ item/recipe/etc database since the data loss can/will be overwritten by a restore, as the database replaces those article/item/recipe/etc ids with the old data. So, we could find ourselves spending days and days replacing what we can, only to have it get all jumbled in with the old stuff in a horribly confused mess. Or we could find ourselves stalling for another couple of weeks, only to find that the expectation of a full restore was mistaken.
There is no happy choice at this point, and I know it has to be frustrating to the communities as well. Know that, if anything, we are even more frustrated than you are.
Hang in there, folks! When we know more, you will know more.
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Originally Posted by Patancia
