As readers can see, we are now back online. The blog was down since the 8th — so nine days.
Besides the downtime, we have also lost data. The comments of all those logged in at the time of the failure were lost. That includes all of my comments and all of Caro’s. Probably others were lost as well. Altogether, half of the comments on the site appear to have been deleted. There is some hope that these can still be restored, I guess, though the outlook doesn’t look that good.
All the labels on all our posts were also deleted. That means that clicking on roundtable links now gives you a blank screen. I doubt this will be restored, though we can hopefully rejigger at least some of it by hand.
All in all, this has been an immensely frustrating and disheartening experience. Our comments are a vital part of the blog; to lose large swathes of them like this is simply not something that should happen. Nor should the blog be down for more than a week at a time.
Part of the problem seems to be that znet, the hosting service, is not reliable. Part of the problem seems to be that tcj.com did not back up the blog correctly. Steps have been taken to resolve some of these problems in the future. Whether they will be sufficient is something I don’t know.
In any case, I have been left with a clearer picture of TCJ’s priorities, and where this blog fits in them. That’s been a very painful lesson, and one I’ll have to continue to mull on as we go forward. For the present, I’d like to apologize to our readers, our commenters, and our contributors. When you come to the blog, you expect your contributions, whether as a poster or a commenter, to be treated with care, respect, and professionalism. I fear that has not been the case. There are various people to point fingers at, but ultimately the blog’s my baby. I should have been more careful with it.
In any case, as we find out more about the update and recovery I will keep you informed. We have a full schedule over the next couple of weeks, including a roundtable on manga next week. Thank you for reading and for your patience.
Update: Michael Dean very politely suggests my version of events is a little out of whack; please scroll down to comments to get his correction.
Update 2: We got our comments back! More complete update here.
That really sucks. One can never stress enough the importance of backing up and making sure the back-ups actually work.
I apologize also to Noah and to HU’s readers for the trouble the site has been having. But there’s a picture painted here — of tcj.com failing to back up the HU comments because HU is such a low priority — that’s not accurate. The responsibility for backing up all the data on the site lies with the ISP that contracts with ZNet. Our tech troubleshooter has been wrestling with this problem pretty much around the clock from the moment it happened, and we are still working with ZNet to get the data needed to fully restore the site’s comments. The many delays that have been experienced on the technical side shouldn’t be taken as a sign that tcj.com hasn’t been longing with all its heart for HU’s return to its full glory.
For what it’s worth: WordPress has a good back-up plugin that can run on a scheduled basis and email you the back-up files. Well worth installing and setting up.
Noah – I’ve been working with WP3.0 in beta for a couple of weeks now at my day job (and just upgraded to the official release this morning!), and at a convention site I admin. We’ve got WordPress Backup by BTE running to back up the upload directory, theme directory, and plugins directory daily. The database is backed up by WP-DBManager. Both plugins have an option to e-mail the backup files, and can be set to run daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
http://www.blogtrafficexchange.com/wordpress-backup
http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/