When It Rains…

Douglas Hackney Sci / Tech

The Fuso frame broke on 18 Feb.

On the night of 19 Feb our web/email/blog/application/FTP/etc. server was wiped out.

According to the hosting company, and I quote, “Everything is gone. We have no idea what happened. The backups are gone too. We can’t restore anything.”

This catastrophic server failure affected the following:

  • Hackney family history archives (some media, family tree database, documents, etc.)
  • Non-travel photos
  • Non-travel writing
  • Autopsis Blog
  • All email accounts
  • How The World Works book web site
  • The Next Name book web site
  • Hackneys Travel (main travel web site)
  • All travel photos from all years
  • Misc. content (data files, media files, etc.)
  • EGLTD archives web site
  • A variety of server side applications
  • A variety of server configurations and parameters
  • Several other misc. web sites that most people don’t access

Sooooooo, I’ve spent the last two days rebuilding, reconfiguring and reloading the server. So far, I’ve got our email, the main travel web site, the book sites and this blog back up.

The upside is that some things, such as the databases, survived intact, and that saved me some work. Another upside is that I happened to be in a place where I could get online and had a couple of days available before I needed to start work on the truck. Another upside is that this gives us a really good reason to update some applications to current versions and to revisit our data management strategies.

It will be a while before we can get the travel photos reloaded. They, along with almost all of the rest of the server data, are being reloaded from our offsite backup copy in the U.S.

If you emailed Steph anything last week, resend it or check with her to confirm she received it. I mirror my email to another server, so I didn’t lose any.

I will post again when all the photos are back up.

I will be looking for volunteers to QA the site (PDF files, links, photos, etc.) when we get it back up. ;^)

And, if you know of a good, reliable Linux based hosting company, please email me.  8^)

4 thoughts on “When It Rains…”

  1. Rob T

    Ouch! I feel your pain. I’m pleased you managed to sort most of this out. What are you going to do about the Fuso?
    I can recommend Bytemark for linux hosting. I use their virtual server debian package which gives complete control via SSH shell. I wonder though, if some of your microsites would be easier to maintain on something like Google Sites with a custom domain. At least the catastrophic failures would be few and far between.

  3. Ron Lucero ( Kearny Mesa Truck Center )

    Doug,
    This does not sound good. If there is anything I can do to help please let me know. My direct number if needed is: 619-886-7262
    Please keep me posted, as I have already contacted Fuso engineering as well. We are all staying very close to this. Thank you.

  4. Pingback: Server Rebuild Complete | Hackneys Travel