Disaster on the TF Wiki

[FFN]

DON'T VISIT THE WIKI - YOUR BROWSER CACHE IS IMPORTANT

Okay. The wiki is stuffed. Apparently the tech person at the server company or whatever decided to do a software update before he had secured our database (and its backups) into a safe location. Apparently he BLOODY STORED THE BLOODY BACKUPS ON THE SAME SERVER AS THE SITE.

I'm merely a regular editor, so I'm not involved with the running of the wiki or any of its technical aspects. I had to hear it from a fellow editor, and some of the moderators only just heard about it.

In the spirit of helping out a fellow site, I would respectfully request visitors from this board help us out by turning your browser offline (all windows must be turned off) and going through your offline pages cache/history and saving the pages you have visited. It may help us restore a portion of articles back to their latest status. This is one of the emergency last-resort solutions an admin suggested, along with googling every page and hoping to heck that Google has cached a relatively recent version of every page.

At the moment, I have no idea where to send these pages, so you'd have to just sit on them for the moment if you choose to help us out.

You have no idea how furious everybody is. I find that the Christian Bale rant works very well for this situation.

Thanks for reading.

Your Pal,
FFN

[kup]

So you lost the whole site? wow, sorry.

I will search through my caches.

Edit: Hey, the site is still up and running.

[FFN]

Don't visit the site right now as it's a VERY old backup from our Wikia days. The site is currently online because the tech guy is apparently investigating a fix.

[STL]

I've barely visited at all recently so I doubt I can help. will check when I get home but best of luck

[griffin]

I've only been to one tfwiki page since my last cache purge, so I can only help with the AHM #8 page. I'm sure someone else may have that page on their computer since it is only new, but if by chance you do need what I have (I've located 37 files from tfwiki, from that one visit), but not sure exactly what I have (and everytime I try to isolate the individual files, the computer renames them, so won't transfer them all).
The 37 files take up about 600kb if you want me to just email them to you (somehow), in case I have something in there that you don't have.

[FFN]

I'm not technically versed enough in the running of the website, but apparently they're trying to find a relatively recent backup and restore the site from that, and using cached pages (either from our browser caches or google caches) is kind of a last resort if no backup can be found or restored. I assume the latter solution would entail us manually editing or creating over 8000 articles, which would suck. I'd suggest hanging on to whatever you have.

HOPEFULLY, we won't need them.

[FFN]

Damage control update: I think our database backups are totally screwed. Currently we're working on saving thousands of Google caches (current up to March 10-12, though unfortunately some have updated to the 16th, wiping out the past 9 months of work on those pages). Naturally articles and additions made since March 10-12 are not cached by Google.

[i_amtrunks]

That is one big bugger.

Hope the company that hosts your site is giving you guys special treatment and whatnot to make up for such a monumental stuff-up.

[jaydisc]

There are two types of people in the world:

1. Those who backup

2. Those who will backup

My apologies if I sound like I'm kicking you when you're down. I'm just hoping this might prevent the next atrocity for someone else...

And remember, if you can't restore a backup, there's no point in having it. In other words....

TEST YOUR ABILITY TO RESTORE YOUR BACKUPS PERIODICALLY!

[Paulbot]

I've lost some fan contributions that only existed on the forum and know not to do that now. I did ask Griffin if he had access to any backups of the board and I think he was looking into it.

How do I look through the cache though? It used to be easy but with the latest versions of IE and Firefox it seems to be harder. There's no folder of files like there was.