We're back!
What a crazy week it has been for Pinside (and a stressful week for me, I might add) with our first major outage in the 20 years or so that Pinside exists. Sure, we've had hiccups but nothing like this. The cause: a power surge, followed by a fire in a generator, followed by sprinklers and our server going down. I wasn't there to see it, but I don't think it was pretty.
Anyways, we're running on a temporary server now, hosted all the way over in Germany (well, that's close for me). Please be nice to it, it's not as powerful as our previous one and there may be problems. Also, not everything functions yet: We have no e-mail notifications yet. And no maps. And probably a bunch of other stuff that doesn't work right now. But at least we're back. I'll be moving to a brand new server (and a different hosting company) later on but I don't want to rush that choice.
As for our data recovery procedure. Well there really wasn't one in place as you may have noticed. Sure I had dual power supplies, dual network uplinks, dual (raid) drives. But I would not have expected a datacenter fire. I should have. I should have had a backup server somewhere, ready to spin up and continue service after a few hours. Truth is, I never got around to setting this up. But I will obviously be working on this, so a downtime like this cannot happen again in the future.
My last database backup was dated 10:02pm, while the server went down 11:39pm. So we lost 1h37m of data. That means any posts, PMs or Marketplace ads placed during that time are gone. And even if they restore our server (they're still working on it but are now giving me an ETA of "weeks") I will not be bringing that data back as that would be a technical nightmare.
If you made a donation or marketplace payment, please contact me. I will also be proactively look into any payments made during that 1h37m and take action or contact you.
Speaking of donations. Feel free to make a donation, if you're happy that we're back!
Let's get the pinball talk going again and please bear with me while I try to keep this temporary server running nicely.
-- Robin
PS: Seeing any issues? Let me know!