Good morning all,
As many I'm sure noticed, eBrandon experienced a fairly lengthy downtime yesterday starting at approx 1:30 PM. As it turns out, the hard drive on the server crashed meaning that it the server was unable to boot up.
Over Monday evening and into late night Monday, the server itself was fitted with a new hard drive and as a result had to have Windows and all other critical software re-installed.
The good news:
- late Monday night and well into the early morning hours I was able to pull various backups of the site to re-build it to what you see today
The not-so-good news:
- the most recent data file backup was December 3 at approx 4:30 PM, so you will see that all messages, classified ads, etc from eBrandon significant 5 1/2+ year history up until Dec 3 have been completely restored. Unfortunately anything over the past ten days will no longer be on the site.
In addition to the ten days, I'm unable to load a backup of classified ad images.. so I ask that if you had pictures associated with your ad that was posted up until the 3rd that you please login via your ID and password (or your eBrandon account) and re-add them. Because of how quickly the classifieds move, no doubt by the end of the day today we'll be seeing new ads complete with pictures and after several days this will become more or less a non-issue. My apologies for the inconvenience.
When it comes to paid ads, over the next 24 hrs I will be refunding payments on any ads submitted since 4:30 PM on the 3rd since those ads are unrecoverable. Basically it amounts to those ads being fortunate enough to have gotten free advertising for ten days. So that everyone else gets a fair shake, I will be adding ten days to the term of any other active paid ad that was posted on or before the 3rd. For those that had posted a paid ad over the last ten days, I'd very much appreciate your re-posting.. but of course if you've managed to find the business you were looking for, if you filled the job, etc then that wouldn't be necessary.
For the photos section of the site, I'm in the process right now of restoring a backup of all images up until the end of July. Because of just how many files there are, that process might take the better part of the day but those images will slowly be restored. Unfortunately images from the last 4 1/2 months were not in that backup.
As a by-product of this restoration, something that I've been meaning to do for a while now has also taken effect... all past archived private messages sent through the system have been emptied out.
Another by-product seems to be a significant server speed-up, at least as I test the site this morning.
There will be a few other minor glitches on the site that you might notice today. I'll be working my behind off today to do what needs to be done to fix those glitches.
The most important news of all:
As you read this, I'm already working on implimenting a MUCH more obsessive daily backup so that the worst we will ever again have as a situation is one day's loss of ads, posts or pictures. This system will be in place by tomorrow at the absolute latest.
Please accept my apologies for the downtime yesterday and for any extra work that might come out of adding pictures to your ads or out of re-posting any ads that you might have had over the last ten days. This is absolutely the first and last time you will ever have to do either.
Thank you for your continued support over the years and if you have a few minutes I'd very much appreciate your taking part in getting the ball rolling in a few current threads since as of this posting most of the recent topics are from ten days ago.
If anyone has any questions, don't hesitate to drop me a PM or an email and I'll do my best to answer.... but of course I will be extremely busy today writing computer code and putting the finishing touches on getting everything up and running smoothly.
Thanks!