The MacDeskBlog

The good news is that with about an hour of hands-on help from Rob Egan, plus some sporadic IM help for the rest of the afternoon, we managed to get the new Dedicated Server up to date using yum and rpm! It then took me over a week to get almost everything up and running the way I like. The phpAdsNew gave me fits for a few days, but I ultimately tracked the problem down. I don’t have MySQL replication working yet, which makes me a bit nervous, but I do have full database backups running nightly at least.

So onto the not so good news. I haven’t rebuilt the past 2 months of missing data yet, and I haven’t filled in the queue going forward yet. Also, as mentioned in the last post, I think I lost some blog entries, and definitely all of the blog user accounts and comments. I’m not worried about the blog entries and comments. Also, not all of my other sites are back online yet.

I could try to rebuild all of the missing data, and I’d likely get most of it correct. However, that wouldn’t really be very fair to people whose pictures were posted the last few days before the crash, since the pictures didn’t get a full week up on the front page.

On the other hand, I could skip rebuilding the missing data, and just post everything again as if it were new. However, that wouldn’t really be very fair to all of the users, since you’d be getting pictures you’d already seen before.

So, what I’ll probably do is rebuild the database as best I can from March 13th through April 27th, and repost pictures which originally went up April 28th through May 4th as if they had never been posted. Any pictures which I’m uncertain about whether or not they were posted previously will also get treated as new.

I have picture titles, categories and artist initials for all of the missing period except for March 22, 23, 30 and April 10. If you still have email announcements covering any of those days (daily or weekly), please send them along to me at the feedback address.

I hope to finish recovering from this by the end of this week. We’ll see how well I managed that. Work has been insanely busy since the middle of last month, which dragged out this process already. This week promises more of the same.

Thank you for the notes of support,

Ryan