The recent data loss
Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 11:08 am
Sooo... usually when someone screws up at something technical and it breaks things for others they're really elaborate about exactly what happened. That'd be pretty pointless now because the mistake was quite simple.
I was working on getting back the old posts that had gotten truncated in the forum move. I was using at the same time a development database into which I would do a fresh import of the data from the old forum in case I managed to mangle the data in it, and a renamed posts table in the live database so I could try to figure out how to import the fixed data from one table to another. This morning, after I'd been at it for a couple of hours, cursing the names of various things that had been causing me trouble... I accidentally did a fresh import of the data from the old forum into the live database instead of the development one.
So, yeah. The forum timewarped into the moment of the move from shireroth.kuroshiro.net. The data loss was irrevocable - the only thing that I know of that could have brought it back is memory-hacking the mysql server or its storage, and I have neither the skill nor the privileges for that.
Luckily I'd taken a backup before I started any work at all last night, so we only lost one day's posts instead of a week's. So, you know, could have been worse.
Note that since the bank and wiki are also in the same database, they have also time-warped to last night.
I am sorry. I'll be more careful next time I work on the database.
I was working on getting back the old posts that had gotten truncated in the forum move. I was using at the same time a development database into which I would do a fresh import of the data from the old forum in case I managed to mangle the data in it, and a renamed posts table in the live database so I could try to figure out how to import the fixed data from one table to another. This morning, after I'd been at it for a couple of hours, cursing the names of various things that had been causing me trouble... I accidentally did a fresh import of the data from the old forum into the live database instead of the development one.
So, yeah. The forum timewarped into the moment of the move from shireroth.kuroshiro.net. The data loss was irrevocable - the only thing that I know of that could have brought it back is memory-hacking the mysql server or its storage, and I have neither the skill nor the privileges for that.
Luckily I'd taken a backup before I started any work at all last night, so we only lost one day's posts instead of a week's. So, you know, could have been worse.
Note that since the bank and wiki are also in the same database, they have also time-warped to last night.
I am sorry. I'll be more careful next time I work on the database.
