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  #1  
Old Feb 15, 2008, 10:59 PM
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Secret Squirrel Secret Squirrel is offline
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Default Welcome back to VGMdb

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.
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  #2  
Old Feb 15, 2008, 11:57 PM
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So good to be back!

Thanks goes to Starla, Blah and everyone i forgot to mention for the recovery.
Thanks also to the vgmdb staff & workers to get it up & working once again.
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  #3  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 03:27 AM
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Gigablah Gigablah is offline
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Glad to see you all again!

There's been a few significant improvements to the code. I'll make some further tweaks before I advance the code version and announce the changelog.
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  #4  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 05:59 AM
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Glad it's all up and running!

I missed you guys
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  #5  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 06:53 AM
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the_miker the_miker is offline
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Ahh it's good to have the best VGM info site back up and running! Don't let it happen again.

-Mike
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  #6  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 09:35 AM
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Great to see the site back up.
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  #7  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 10:19 AM
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Yay! This downtime episode was scary, but in the end, VGMdb is back on track and eveything's good. Big thanks to all who saved the day!
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  #8  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 11:37 AM
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LuxKiller65 LuxKiller65 is offline
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And here we have another proof of how incompetent some companies are. Seriously, now you should ask them your money back... at least!
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  #9  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 02:12 PM
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knighTeen87 knighTeen87 is offline
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ah!!!i missed you so much VGMdb,my VGM life was nearly dead without you,I'm so happy that you are alive!
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  #10  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 03:03 PM
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It's a relief to see you back online. Props to Ms. Starla for going as far as shipping replacement parts for the drive. Whew!
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  #11  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 05:13 PM
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I've actually got the current vgmdb backed up on two of my drives now. And it's on blah's server too. Plus his laptop. And it was probably already backed up on our new server as well. I think we're pretty safe now even if a meteor decided to crash on our host.

Welcome back, everyone!
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  #12  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 05:18 PM
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Sabreman Sabreman is offline
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Good news. Glad a major crisis was averted
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  #13  
Old Feb 16, 2008, 05:49 PM
Muzza Muzza is offline
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Awesome. ^.~ Glad to see this epic monster of a VGM database back.
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  #14  
Old Feb 17, 2008, 01:13 AM
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Sword Serenity Sword Serenity is offline
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It's good to see VGMdb back up and running!

What goodies have you in store for us, Blah?
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  #15  
Old Feb 17, 2008, 11:38 AM
Zorbfish Zorbfish is offline
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Props on the speedy recovery.
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  #16  
Old Feb 17, 2008, 11:49 PM
Sitorimon Sitorimon is offline
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fantastic to see the site back Without doubt a priceless site for me!

Si
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  #17  
Old Feb 18, 2008, 07:43 AM
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Gaia Gaia is offline
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Congratulation!

The news about the hard drive crash hit me hard. I realized that I was missing something precious, once it was gone. VGMdb is such a very important ressource. It's so great that it's back up. Thumbs up, guys.
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  #18  
Old Feb 18, 2008, 07:28 PM
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It's good that the data is backed up in different areas currently, but I'm still concerned about down the road. ServInt's backups are good, but they won't be a complete solution. What is the official plan for backing up? How often is it done and with what method(s)? I also would like to know if a backup method could be tied to ensuring that data at VGMdb isn't compromised by malicious users (the moderation queue is good, but I'm not sure if it handles all cases, especially if trusted editors turn maverick).
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  #19  
Old Feb 18, 2008, 09:30 PM
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I was planning on posting this later, but currently I have it set up so that a nightly cron job synchronizes the scan directories to my Dreamhost account (using rsync), along with the daily mysql database dump (I'll probably retain daily db backups as long as a week). This means we have four copies of the scans and database, since both ServInt and Dreamhost have their own backup systems. Deletions aren't propagated to the backup host either, so we can fall back on that if, say, someone deletes a rare scan.
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  #20  
Old Feb 19, 2008, 04:33 AM
OST Collector OST Collector is offline
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Great you're back guys! Thanks Starla!
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  #21  
Old Feb 19, 2008, 11:23 AM
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Kaleb.G Kaleb.G is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Gigablah View Post
I was planning on posting this later, but currently I have it set up so that a nightly cron job synchronizes the scan directories to my Dreamhost account (using rsync), along with the daily mysql database dump (I'll probably retain daily db backups as long as a week). This means we have four copies of the scans and database, since both ServInt and Dreamhost have their own backup systems. Deletions aren't propagated to the backup host either, so we can fall back on that if, say, someone deletes a rare scan.
That sounds airtight to me. I need to figure out how to use cron jobs on my own server, since currently I just manually backup my data.
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  #22  
Old Feb 21, 2008, 03:07 PM
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Really glad to see the site back without data loss, concidering the number of people involved in it (coding wise and album submiting wise).

And indeed that "Layered Technologies" company isn't really fair, especialy when asking 300$ for the broken hard drive.
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