About the outage/site down-destroyed

[kissa_bites]

 

Thank you so much for joining us once again. Many of you noticed that we were gone for a week and you may notice that a great portion of the site is still missing – possibly even your work. For that, I gravely apologize.

 

The night of, Saturday, 3.15, the servers of my web hosting company were hacked/cracked by someone who knew their system intimately. 40% of their servers were affected, unfortunately, mine was among them. Among those servers, a destroy code was run that also hit many of the servers’ information backups. Also, mine was in that number. It took several days of the hosting support team to recover – they are, in fact, still recovering. In trying to restore the website, I was told of the most heartbreaking news. We discovered that every backup stored on my computer, including the backup that I made on 3.8.08 was incomplete. The databases that run the site were not included in any backup on my local machine. The reason for the incomplete backup is unknown, but it is a major technical error that I am trying to solve.

 

My webmaster, Chris, had one backup with the databases as intact as possible, dating from late last year. That is the website you see now. Every aspect of the site is currently from 2007 with the exception of the chatroom. Chris is spending a lot of time making what updates he could based off of old emails that we exchanged and is getting as much completed before we reopen.

 

Over the next several weeks, I will be working to restore as much as I can of the site, going from the old website archives from 2005-6 as well as sending letters to those that sent in their creative work, asking them to restore their work so others may yet enjoy it. Also, I will be making all of the smaller changes that we made to the site that were made “on the fly”. If you find something that isn’t right or isn’t currently correct, please don’t hesitate to send me an email. I will do my best to make the change as soon as possible.

 

Also, I will personally be backing up the website on two fronts – both the full site and secondary database backups and double checking each file for completeness. The web hosting company is doing everything humanly possible to make their servers safer and to change their backup policies. Their backup servers will no longer be kept online when not actively in use and will not be vulnerable to attack.

 

Thank you all so much for your patience and understanding. I will let you know when everything is ready to go for uploading for you to restore your files. In the meantime, I’ll be getting the site back in shape so we can continue on to be better than ever. As always, chat does go on and will go on, as it is currently lodged on a second site. I will also let you know when chat on the site itself is available.

 

Thank you,

c.

Comments

[magicalobizuth.livejournal.com]

I am so sorry. I know how horrible this can be and I can imagine how insanely pissed off and frustrated you must have been as you were going through it all.

Oh, I have an idea, dunno how much it will help. Google your site and click on the "Cached" link and hopefully you can recover something from the last time that Google cached your site. I helped someone recover some journal entries that would have been lost otherwise from a travelblog that way.

[benevolntgoddes.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for that idea. Sadly, it didn't work. The spiders run through my site way too much and cached the ancient backups and 404's as they were put in. My system has copies of all stories, etc, *but they aren't attached to an author, title, summary... nothing. If I don't recognize it, it's useless words, sadly.

Thanks again. That you understand means so much to me - many just don't get it.