It seems like it's been forever, even though we were only down for a bit over 4 weeks. Most everyone probably knows the story by now, but on January 17th the disc that holds VGMdb (and GFF) went down and wouldn't boot back up. We scrambled around looking for our backups, discovering that what we had together was considerably older than we remembered, so old that the only option was to attempt some kind of data recovery. Our former hosting company LayeredTech agreed to send the dead drive to us if we paid a ransom of $300 plus shipping. We had no choice, and canceled our contract with them once Miles received the drive.
So at this stage, we were looking at spending a significant amount of money recovering the data. This is where OCRemix steps into the picture. Starla (Injury on OCR) works for a data recovery center. With her expertise, Miles was able to repair the drive at minimal cost, after which it booted like a champ.
A more detailed synopsis with photographs of the drive repair can be found here in the VGFrequency blog.
So we all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Starla, Liontamer, and the OCR crew, as well as to Miles for his skilled handiwork and for being the point man for the operation, and to Gigablah for getting everything up and running, even better than before. (Not forgetting Ramaniscence of
ThaSauce, from whom Starla first got wind of our predicament.)
One thing that I can promise is that this will never happen again. The information in our database is priceless, and represents thousands of hours of work -- research, translation, submission -- performed by people all over the world. We hope to quickly reestablish your faith in our ability to serve as caretakers of the VGMdb data. Our new host (
Servint) provides us with an on-site backup, which will make it easy to recover quickly from future hardware failures. Moreover, we are going to keep at least 4 distinct backups of the database and scans, in different parts of the world, so as not to rely on any single means of recovery.
So with that, I'd like to welcome everyone back. If you find any new issues with the site, or if something isn't working as you expected, please let us know by posting in the forum.