Broadcasthe.net NEWS

And we’re back…

As you all know by now, the site suffered downtime and data loss, due to hardware issues. We understand that many of you will have questions, and hopefully some of them are answered here.

• How did this happen again? Our backup policies were reviewed after the April 2015 incident, but we experienced something of a worst case scenario in terms of hardware failure. We had multiple drives die within a day of each other, which caused the functional backup date to be pushed to April 9th.

• Why do you only make backups every few weeks? We have multiple different backup processes that store data in different places (both on- and off-site), so that if one type of backup is completely destroyed, the others are still available. That's what happened here, and unfortunately it was the most recent backups that were lost.

• Will this be prevented from happening again in the future? While we can't guarantee that we'll never have another catastrophe, we're already testing out new systems to make sure that our off-site backups are as up-to-date as possible. We're aiming to get any potential future losses down to minutes at most.

• Why did the site take so long to come back online? Unfortunately this was largely out of our hands. Our host had some issues at the datacenter and that delayed replacing the drives. BTN was brought back for staff roughly 24 hours ago; this time was used to fix torrents that had incorrect information when re-added, and to work on other areas of the restoration process. We restored access to Overlord+ a short time before the rest of the userbase so they could catch up on uploading encodes done during this time, and to ensure that everything was working properly.

• What is restored? What was lost? Restored: Uploaded torrents and who uploaded them, class promotions, enabled/disabled accounts, accounts registered during the data loss period were re-created under their respective inviters (they will need to reset their passwords), and all other aspects of site should be working properly. Lost: BP accrued, filled requests, data transfer, any Lumens or BP store purchases or exchanges, requests created, snatches, forum posts, Advent prizes, donation perks, and email and password changes.

• I donated in the last few weeks and don’t have my donation perk now… what should I do? Please send a Staff PM with the BTC amount, transaction ID, hash ID, amount in Euro, and the date that you donated. If you don’t have all of that information, please fill out as much of it as possible, so kenyz can credit your account with proper donation amount. Thank you for supporting BTN!

• I bought a promotion during the lost time, do I have to buy it again? Promotions that were bought during the downtime have been restored, so you will not need to buy them again. Note: Your stats may be below your current user class requirements due to the data lost, you will need to attain the required stats for your next promotion.

• What happens about April’s Advent? We will extend April’s Advent into May.
• Are my Advent prizes from the last few weeks gone? Unfortunately, yes. There’s no way for us to recover Advent prizes.
• Will there be a compensation package? Yes, that will be detailed in a coming news post.

We're sorry that this has happened again. If you have further questions, we're happy to answer them in this thread. We'd like to thank everyone for your extended patience while BTN recovers from this and for your continued support of the site...