NotWhat.CD News - About downtime

NWCD Downtime

Welcome back.

Many of you will already know the following via announcements in our IRC, RED forums and reddit, but many will not.

As the team responsible for ensuring the longevity of our tracker, it saddens us deeply to have to announce this.

NWCD suffered complete hardware failure on September 23rd.

We have always faithfully and religiously taken very frequent backups of our database and images, to the point of being able to restore NWCD to within any 60 minute period we could possibly want in the event of a data loss.

On this occasion, due to circumstances we could not have foreseen, the most recent backups proved unusable due to problems our server experienced in the few weeks leading up to the 23rd. These problems were unknown to us right up to the point the tracker and site went down. After some investigation, it became evident that we were not going to be able to fully restore the site and tracker to that date. We have a portion of usable data from those backups, but not enough to restore the database fully and without creating a mess in the process.

After considerable staff discussion, we felt it would be more beneficial to bring everything back up as soon as possible using the most recent viable backup, and ask you to re-upload your lost torrents from the missing period yourselves. This will enable our moderators to concentrate on reexamining the 1k or so resolved gold submission reports we have lost and cannot recover on the torrent moderation side.

We have now restored the database and site using what we believe is the most recent viable backup from the 22nd August. We have all data relating to members who joined the site during this lost period, and affected users will be re-invited to NWCD duing the next few hours.

NWCD has lost 32 days of its life. This means all uploaded torrents, forum posts, private messages and reports from this period are no longer with us. Given that the month of September was the most active month NWCD has experienced for some time, this is a significant loss that many of us will feel. As a staff team, we will do whatever we can to assist our members in restoring their lost torrents to the site as quickly and simply as possible. We have learnt a hard lesson from all of this, and moving forward will be taking the necessary steps to ensure that should we suffer a similar issue in the future, we can do as intended and restore the site without a data loss.

Please keep all NWCD torrents seeding in your clients. Once seeders come back online, you can isolate any NWCD torrents that are in an error state and identify which are your own and will need to be reuploaded. As torrents are reuploaded, those errors will slowly disappear and torrents will turn green.

Lost torrents will appear as Tracker: [Failure reason \"Unregistered torrent\"]

We kindly ask that all NWCD members please respect those users that uplaoded torrents during this period and allow them a grace period of 30 days to reupload their own torrents to the site. We will assess the situation again at the end of the 30 day period.

Please report any errors or issues on site using the bug forum.

We thank all of you for your patience and support during this period of downtime. It has meant a great deal to us.

:heart:

NWCD Staff