05-19-2015, 07:22 AM
As most of you know by now, last weekend we had a major blowup of our forum software and Packey, our webmaster, had to reload the software and the database. He had a lot of problems getting things to work after that, but with perseverance and long hours, he managed to restore everything but our archive of photos. So, just so you all know, here is where we are right now. There are some 23,000 photos that have been posted here since we opened in Dec 2008, we've always encouraged people to post photos, what good is a model train forum if we can't see what everyone is doing, or get some exciting prototype shots to look at? Those photos still exist in our database, but for some reason, the phpBB forum software that we use just doesn't want to access them. All these photos are in a directory on our server. New photos go in the same directory. We can see no difference between the old and new ones, yet the new ones show, but the old ones don't and we are not sure why. We have reinstalled this photo database with one we know had worked in the past, it is a bit outdated, but better than nothing, but it won't work either.
The bottom line is that we have not lost all these photos, they are in our database, we just can't access them for now. We're not sure if we will ever be able to, but we will not stop trying to find a way. There may be some hidden key or piece of code we need to add, and all will be well again. In the meantime, new photo uploads do appear as normal, so do not hesitate to attach new photos to your posts. Also, any links to off-site photo storage like Photobuckets are still alive. We are implementing a different method of automatically doing our backups so that we don't have to rely on uploading a new version of the software along with a database that had been downloaded at some point in time. Storage will also go to the cloud in the event that our server goes awry as well. In the even that something gets corrupt, we will be able to restore it with much later data.
The basic cause of all this was with a recent updated version of our software not working right and taking us down, and it's hard to protect our data against things like that. We stand a better chance of a full recovery when things are stored off site and in the cloud. We are all upset about this, but it is what it is and we will do our best to get back what we can. No guarantees, but we will try our best.
The bottom line is that we have not lost all these photos, they are in our database, we just can't access them for now. We're not sure if we will ever be able to, but we will not stop trying to find a way. There may be some hidden key or piece of code we need to add, and all will be well again. In the meantime, new photo uploads do appear as normal, so do not hesitate to attach new photos to your posts. Also, any links to off-site photo storage like Photobuckets are still alive. We are implementing a different method of automatically doing our backups so that we don't have to rely on uploading a new version of the software along with a database that had been downloaded at some point in time. Storage will also go to the cloud in the event that our server goes awry as well. In the even that something gets corrupt, we will be able to restore it with much later data.
The basic cause of all this was with a recent updated version of our software not working right and taking us down, and it's hard to protect our data against things like that. We stand a better chance of a full recovery when things are stored off site and in the cloud. We are all upset about this, but it is what it is and we will do our best to get back what we can. No guarantees, but we will try our best.
Don (ezdays) Day
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD
Board administrator and
founder of the CANYON STATE RAILROAD