MKF is back up and running

MKF is currently up and running, but of course, not like how it used to be. Of this, I am deeply sorry.

There are still some images that are missing which many of you will notice, but I think Heather has them, so I will wait until she returns from vacation to restore those images. I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest vbulletin, so there are several new additions to the forums - such as tags, which you will see. The MKF blog, for those who check in on it once in a while will also be uploaded in the next few days.

I noticed that google has archived some of our old pages into cache - if anyone is utterly bored, and can grab some of those archived pages and send them to me, that would be nice to create an archive file of all of the posts lost since then.

You guys are free to complain in this thread. I know that much precious data has been lost. The one thing I am happy about is that none of Michelle’s posts have been lost. Knowing now that our web host does not back up plans that use VPS, I will be backing up much more consistently. Also, if any of you know of alternative, good affordable web hosts, please let me know. Also, if there is anything that is missing that you think MKF used to have (besides our data of course).. like missing images, plugins, strange behaviour, please let me know.

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This is what I had posted on the front page yesterday, for those who may have missed it:

I apologize deeply for the problems that all of you are encountering today. It’s been quite frustrating having to deal with this while at work, but our web host, A Small Orange had some major issues yesterday evening.
I woke up this morning, as I’m sure all of you did, to find that mkforum.net was inaccessible.

I sent off an e-mail to ask them what was wrong. They told me they would run some scripts to get it up and running. I thought that meant it was a minor issue with the system. When it completed, they sent me an e-mail to tell me that it was complete and that I’d have to go through these steps to reconfigure it and have to re-upload the web site.

As some of you might have seen, for some time the front page read “Apache and Control Panel has been successfully configured.” I also had a heart attack when I saw this, because it means that nothing that was there exists anymore.

Anyway, long story short. This is what happened to the server that mkforum.net is on: http://forums.asmallorange.com/index…howtopic=11957
and when I flipped out, they responded with this:

“Hi Grace, I apologize for the inconvenience with this. The disk partition where all the VPSes were configured had to be reformatted. Since we don’t maintain individual backups of the VPSes, we don’t have any customer data to restore. The VPS itself is back online, so I can help you with any reconfiguration needed on the server However, if you have any backups of data that you’ve downloaded to your computer at home, I can help you restore that information.”

The good news is that I DO have a backup. The bad news is that it’s from February. I HAD made other backups, but they were on all onto the server itself. This means that a lot of data has been lost, from between February to now. I am very sorry that this has happened. I was not aware that our service did not back up the servers, and now that I do, I will be extremely diligent about backing up regularly. I am NOT at all happy with the current situation - half of it being my own fault, half of it our web hosts.
I will try my hardest to get some semblance of our forum working again, as soon as possible. This may take a while because I have to reconfigure the server, re-install vbulletin, and get it up to speed. But I will try to get all the basics down so members can at least post again.

Just so you may have an idea what data is gone, the following will be gone:
New posts made since February 6
New threads made since February 6
Forum changes or additions made since February 6
Private messages since February 6
If you signed up for a user account since February 6, you will have to sign up again.

I will try to recover some of the old blog posts.

Regards, ~Grace