This is relevant to current forum members only. I'm reposting the information here for those not on Facebook.

Sorry about the server issues, guys and gals. Here's what happened:

For some of you this will sound like :blah: :blah: :blah: sit and wait….

Last night at 4:00, I put in a request to enable SSH on my account. GoDaddy said this would require that my sites and databases be migrated to new servers. No problem. It says it'll happen sometime in the next 24 hours, although one thing said 24-72 hours. Either way, whatever. No problem.

Last night, I got a series of emails outlining that I would need to update my database connection strings for my applications to point to the new servers and that if I didn't do it within 24 hours, I could lose data in my applications. No problem. I did that at midnight last night.

Since yesterday at 4:00, the sites have been behaving normally, even after the DB server change in code that I made, and my account's hosting control panel has showed that a change was pending.

Today at 4:30-ish, all of my sites went down for a few minutes, then they came back up (well, some of them – the NWDR forum was one of them). None of my other sites have changed in a day, so there are no issues, but the data for the forum was rolled back a day, to approximately when I put in the request. My account still shows changes pending.

So, I freaked out, locked the forum so people won't keep posting, and I called GoDaddy. Essentially, they said that I need to wait for the system to finish updating, which could take another day (or less). After that, if the database isn't showing the data from the last day, I can call them again and they can try to resurrect the data from the old DB.

So that's the story. The forum is locked until the migration process has completed and I can try to get the data issue resolve. Unfortunately, if the process completes tomorrow, I probably won't be able to get to it until the evening since I have a dental appointment in the morning and then a meeting from 11:00-5:00.

Sorry about this, guys and gals. If I knew this was going to happen, I would have given some warning…and backed up the DB every 20 minutes. :excuseme:

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And then Munkel suggested that we just forget about the lost data and go forward as is.

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My concern is that we will lose all of this. If all the data we wrote today is still going to be switched over, we will lose this thread, and I don't care about that. But, if we open the forum and everyone keeps posting, we may lose all of that moving forward. At least now, worst case is we only lose yesterday until 4:30 today and then these comments about the issue.

UPDATE @ 10:40PM

The update/migration has completed and I just got off the phone with GD support. They are going to try to get an export of the old data (as SQL) which I will have to manually merge back into the forum. I'm not sure how difficult that will be. In theory, I can do it, but I don't know how complex the tables are for PHPbb. I'm tempted to just turn it back on and forget about the lost data. Any thoughts?

I should mention that the trade off for losing a day's worth of posts (Tuesday about 4:10PM to Wednesday about 4:30PM and beyond as no one can post currently) is that we may have to wait as long as 72 hours to get the data and then however long it takes for me to get it merged.