Uhh, sorry about that......

[ezdays]

For those of you that tried to log on here the past 20 or so hours and couldn't, we apologize. :oops: We had a rather large hiccup and Packey wound up rebuilding the forum and the database. He could not update the software, so things are just as they were last night about this time. We are sorry, and even more so since Packey had worked the night through and most of the day. It seems as if we have an extraordinarily large database, and uploading it takes a bit more time than we'd like, especially when you get errors and have to start over again.

Anyway, we're back up and we haven't lost any data. We still plan on shutting down for a short time next Friday night when we plan on adding the Chat Room and Taptalk, but that should go a lot smoother than this. Our thanks and admiration goes the Packey for sticking with this as long as he did. I might also mention that in the process, he also lost his Flatt Bear cartoon site since it is on the same server as Big Blue, and had to rebuild that as well.

All is well now, and thank you Packey for a job well done getting us out of this mess as unscathed as you did....

[teejay]

Good to see you back !

[faraway]

Thanks for handling the hiccup. It is good have Big Blue back online.
Will the board show up in Tapatalk immediately when the software is installed (hopeful next Friday) or do you have to register with the Tapalalk administrator first?

[cn nutbar]

A sincere THANK YOU to all those people behind the scene (especially Packey) who work so hard to make Big Blue the best train web-site by far---you guys are the best

[Tyson Rayles]

Please thanks Packey for us! Glad we are back.

[Steamtrains]

I had the shakes and withdrawal symptoms without my daily BB-fix...
Great to see you back. Thank Packey on our behalf...!!

[ezdays]

Yeah, we're all relieved that things turned out the way they did. Packey tried to do an update and it turns out that there was more than one "latest version" and the one he was lead to took Big Blue down. It was a long arduous process just for him to get us back to where we were. Fortunately, he had just done a backup of the database before this all happened and so we lost nothing in the process except about 15 or so hours of Packey's time.

Software updates can be good, or not. I know that last month Windows 7 had an update that caused my computer, (and a lot of other folk's) to go into an endless reboot cycle. In our case here, the upgrade had minimal value to us, and so it appears that we are better off without it for now. They say that when someone updates their software, it's always a good idea to wait a while and see what happens with it before you install it. This is a good case why that is true....

Thank you all for your patience, this has not happened that often for us, thanks to the people we have working in the background.

[ezdays]

One little glitch left. It appears as if a lot of photos are showing as filenames, including new uploads, rather than as the photo. It appears as if there is a missing file path that Packey will have to restore. I'll let you all know as soon as he gets this corrected, in the meantime, you might now want to upload any photos right now. Just hold tight for a while please..... :wait:

[Canadian Atlantic Railway]

A big thank you to Packey to getting the site running again

[Duffy]

Thanks all for your ... well thanks. There was a time there for a while I thought surely we'd lost everything for good.

As EZ said, the problem stemmed from a very large database. For those who care, everything on this forum is handled by a database. Usernames, passwords, posts, smilies, everything. And it's placed in one single SQL file. After being up since 2008, that database has gotten enormous. 250mb large. for a file that's essentially text, that's big. To make matters worse, the places that handle these SQL files have limitations as to how big files can be to be imported and moved. 32mb. When I was running the upgrade database portion of the update, the server timed out and killed the database. The reset was exhausting history.

It's true, in a tired attempt to recover, directories were deleted and files obliterated, including my own site.

Everything has been recovered with one exception. Any photos that were attached in posts made recently, are now just dead links. the directory that housed the actual files became corrupt and the files were unrecoverable. Closest I could get was recovering from a July backup.

My apologies for this. I know we made a recently migration from gallery to attachments, some of you put in gobs of hard work getting that taken care of. So this doesn't happen again, I'm installing a backup mod to the forum. That way we can recover more easily. I know this doesn't help us right now, but it's something.

We are still on track for the mods. They'll be added by this weekend. I'm not sure how Tapatalk works, if you need to register. When I get into it, I'll post instructions for those who will use it.

[ezdays]

Just got off the phone with Packey, and he's doing his best to restore the missing photo directory. He's got a backup that is not corrupt from last year and is now uploading it. He says there are over 23,000 files in it and it is taking hours to upload. He will post something when it's complete, from what it looks like though, we will most likely lose any photos that have been attached since around mid-July of last year. That's not great news, but recovering over six years of photo data isn't the worse news we could have. We were a bit upset that we might have lost a lot more than that.

We will keep you posted, but the upload might take a while yet to complete.

Your patience and understanding is beyond what we would expect and we thank you all for that.

[teejay]

Thanks again to Packey and his huge effort on this .....I'm sure I can speak for all as to our appreciation .

T

[Duffy]

Welp, the closest I can get to a full recovery on this issue is a backup I found from when we first migrated to the new server. which was back in July of last year. Yikes. not perfect but at least it's something. otherwise, we would have lost a lot more photos. It was a directory, like EZ said, that was over 22,000 files at a total of 2.5gb of stuff.

The only thing I can suggest at this time is for those who know they have photos that don't show up to re upload them. Hopefully you guys still have them stored locally.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank PHPBB open source for their contribution to this whole debockle, and in the MYSQL and the SQL server contribution to reducing my life by six days and burning away the last square inch of stomach lining I might have still had before Friday.

[ngauger]

We do appreciate all you did, Packey! Recover what you can....

[BR60103]

Well, I had an important post to make, and now I can't remember what t was.

I got a nasty redirection from Flatt Bear, so when I saw BigBlue down as well, I figured it was computers. But I didn't think you were updating until next week.

I don't have many photos on here; let me know if there are any blanks.

Any way to delete outdated threads, like announcements of shows from years ago?