Info about ToledoTalk.com's April 22, 2015 data-loss issue

my apr 25, 2015 comment to TT:

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The issue Wednesday evening, April 22 was not database-specific. The entire file system reverted back to an earlier time in the day.

On Wednesday evening, the hosting provider executed some unscheduled maintenance. I don't know if it was an image backup issue or what, but the file system laid out was from mid-morning.

I checked the web server log files for April 22 because I wanted to see how many new comments and threads were created and lost. But the log file showed a large gap of missing information, and that's how I knew it was not a database problem.

If the problem was restricted only to the database, then the web server log file would have remained intact.

These are consecutive entries from the log file file, edited down to focus on the time stamps, which are listed in Pacific time

[22/Apr/2015:06:05:12 -0700] "GET /cgi-bin/tt.pl/article/121931
[22/Apr/2015:06:05:16 -0700] "GET /weather/html/alerts.rss
[22/Apr/2015:06:05:46 -0700] "GET /weather/html/alerts.rss
[22/Apr/2015:18:28:23 -0700] "GET /
[22/Apr/2015:18:28:24 -0700] "GET /
[22/Apr/2015:18:28:27 -0700] "GET /
[22/Apr/2015:18:28:31 -0700] "GET /cgi-bin/tt.pl/article/190451

The site returned at 9:28 p.m. EDT on Wed, Apr 22, and according to the log file, the previous activity to the site occurred at 9:05 a.m., which became the new state of the file system and the site when the site returned in the evening.

Early each morning, I dump the database for backup purposes, but that would not have helped with Wednesday's issue. Fortunately, the hosting provider gave me two other database dump files, and on Friday evening, I was able to insert some of the lost data.

Some counters will be off for a few threads, but I'm not going fix those. I'm more interested in retrieving the posts. I'll see if more data can be retrieved.

#toledotalk