Folks,

I've just learned (after a 2 day outage) that the ElectricalPhotos website cannot be restored. I still don't know what happened, but I've been told the backup was corrupted and it will have to be re-installed from scratch. What this means is that the pictures uploaded there are gone.

I will get to that as soon as I can. If anyone spots any threads (at the forum here) with missing pictures, please post a link to that thread here. I have copies of some pictures on my pc that should fill in some holes.

Lesson learned, one Backup is not enough,

Bill

Bill,
In case you've forgotten, this is the festive season,
considering all the work you've done with this site over the past few months, I'd say it's time you had a bit of relaxation.

I don't think I'm the only one saying that it can wait until after the festive season has ended, before we tear into this problem.

It is unfortunate that this has happened at this time of the year.

Just my $0.02 worth.

Google archives might help - a German board lost all posts due to faulty (read non-existant) backups and they restored everything with the help of Google.

Thanks for the response. Any idea how I would go about trying that?

Bill

Mike,

Thanks for your comments. I'm pretty bummed out about the whole thing, but will be more careful next time for sure.

Bill

Bill-
Do not beat yourself up over this!
you have one of the finest electrical forums on the web and do a fantastic job of maintaining it. Take a rest and enjoy the season and things will sort themselvees out.
Ken

These things unfortunately happen Bill.
Enjoy your Christmas and worry about it in the New Year.

It is quite possible that the photo's are stored somewhere on Google and may be retrieved from a database.

Enjoy the festive season for now
Kind Regards, Raymond

Not really... but giving Google a call might help (weird you can't find a support e mail address these days...)
http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/

Google appears to have flushed the index of the site. It must have done a crawl and noticed the DNS is not configured. Did the hosting company take it all down completely? I know how to find cache stuff at Google, but I fear with the DNS shut off, it may be flushed now. A standard Google search finds nothing on the site.

I wonder what kind of backups the hosting company was doing. I've done so many backups in my years of data center administration and have learned the patterns of what fails and the effect. When compressed tapes fail, everything after the point of failure is lost. I no longer trust that technology.

My current backup technology of choice is a gauntlet of external hard drives and file system replication. Since I use Linux, I can do my replication with rsync. If I only need a limited amount of archival history, I do what is called "hard linked tree" replication. That's good for about 30 points of time. Any more than that and a versioning system like Subversion or Mercurial gets all the history needed, but at the cost of having to run a database and increased exposure to failures having widescale impact. If course if any of those hard drives dies, you lose all that data. That's why I keep multiple copies. I don't know what tools are good to do the same with Windows. But the backup machine and the server being backed up really need to be the same OS class (Windows vs. BSD/Linux/Unix).