NEWS: Forum reverted to backup

[EEVblog]

I'm still down around 100 posts but not that concerned about it.

That's interesting, your account shows deleted sposts for threads like "your pet peeve", yet that thread is still intact. Strange...

[Ian.M]

My missing post (from browser history):
3561403 in https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/12v-l-e-d-light-bar/

[Muttley Snickers]

The snapshot below taken on 10/04/21 shows 2135 posts and I posted a couple more after that and hadn't deleted any. I have no clue what threads they were posted in and they may not be recent posts either, in fact they could have been from years back.

[wilfred]

IMHO when you post a message on a public forum, you are granting the forum the right to display the content you have created in perpetuity^*.  Once you hit [Post] or [Send] its out of your control. 

*  unless the forum offers users a more restrictive content creators license, granting the users more rights.

Well there is this in the forum's rules sticky.

"Removal of Data:
You are free to delete or edit your own posts at any time."

It has been there as long as I can recall. It certainly is in accord with Dave's free approach in the early days. Perhaps he's a little battle weary these days but I wouldn't be encouraging him to change it. I cleaned up a bunch of my own rubbish which was of no enduring value (if it even ever had any). I doubt it negatively affected anyone.

[tautech]

Posts MIA from these threads:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/wavetek-2025a-0-2-2-200mghz-rf-sig-gen-repair/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/sourcing-the-fork-terminals-used-on-oscilloscope-probe-ground-leads/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/design-a-new-precision-lcr-tweezers/

Who's posts are missing?

Mine and other members.

[tautech]

Posts MIA from these threads:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/wavetek-2025a-0-2-2-200mghz-rf-sig-gen-repair/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/sourcing-the-fork-terminals-used-on-oscilloscope-probe-ground-leads/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/design-a-new-precision-lcr-tweezers/

Who's posts are missing?

Mine and other members.

TurboTom typed a extensive and detailed reply yesterday and that's gone too:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/rigol-ds1074z-s-function-generator-help/

[SeanB]

Everybody makes mistakes, just that Dave has been consistent in having a backup that is current. More importantly, that backup works! +1000% for Dave having that, and for Gnif spending his weekend hours and into the wee hours to fix things.

Dave, you do not pay Gnif enough.

[EEVblog]

Posts MIA from these threads:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/wavetek-2025a-0-2-2-200mghz-rf-sig-gen-repair/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/sourcing-the-fork-terminals-used-on-oscilloscope-probe-ground-leads/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/design-a-new-precision-lcr-tweezers/

Who's posts are missing?

Mine and other members.

This is very strange.
When I look at the first 3 pages of your post history, there are none in the Deleted folder.
Mutley's profile on the other hand I see a few on the first page:



Yet if I hit the Restore button, it doesn't seem to work, and a search for April 1st in that thread doesn't show the posts.

Yet the thread exists just fine:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/your-pet-peeve-technical-or-otherwise/

So I have no idea how the post got deleted and why it's not restoring 

[EEVblog]

Everybody makes mistakes, just that Dave has been consistent in having a backup that is current. More importantly, that backup works! +1000% for Dave having that, and for Gnif spending his weekend hours and into the wee hours to fix things.
Dave, you do not pay Gnif enough.

With hindsight maybe we should have gone back several days in the backup and just ate a couple of thousand new posts maybe (the forum gets about 800 new posts a day IIRC), it seems that something was screwed up.

[tautech]

Posts MIA from these threads:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/wavetek-2025a-0-2-2-200mghz-rf-sig-gen-repair/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/sourcing-the-fork-terminals-used-on-oscilloscope-probe-ground-leads/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/design-a-new-precision-lcr-tweezers/

Who's posts are missing?

Mine and other members.

This is very strange.
When I look at the first 3 pages of your post history, there are none in the Deleted folder.

Not even the new topic I started which also is MIA ?   

TBH I'm very reluctant to make any further detailed posts to help members until the forum proves its trustworthiness. 

[Muttley Snickers]

Sorry Dave, I did delete that pet peeve post a day after posting it as I felt the language might have been out of order in retrospect.

[EEVblog]

Sorry Dave, I did delete that pet peeve post a day after posting it as I felt the language might have been out of order in retrospect.

Ah right, still doesn't explain why the restore function doesn't work.
I've used it before and it's always worked.

[EEVblog]

TBH I'm very reluctant to make any further detailed posts to help members until the forum proves its trustworthiness. 

There is no evidence at all that there is any issues with future posts.
With regards to your missing thread, we did go to a backup, so anyone who posted anything after that backup point will have lost their post, that's just the way daily backups work.
Your post was almost certainly one of those.

[tautech]

Everybody makes mistakes, just that Dave has been consistent in having a backup that is current. More importantly, that backup works! +1000% for Dave having that, and for Gnif spending his weekend hours and into the wee hours to fix things.
Dave, you do not pay Gnif enough.

With hindsight maybe we should have gone back several days in the backup and just ate a couple of thousand new posts maybe (the forum gets about 800 new posts a day IIRC), it seems that something was screwed up.

And piss members off even more that have posted in great detail over that time ?
Whatever time your little faux pas has cost you members collectively have lost more.

Please remember this any time admin work is carried out.

[lowimpedance]

 Still down 30 posts, with no idea what threads they would have been from    . Since I don't post often I'm not certain how far back this "cleansing" has gone. The show posts seems to show all and a quick look back to 2018 at those threads appear to be intact. Oh well at least I'm still above  1000  !, Which only took a decade to get  .
 At least total FUBAR has been mostly averted. .

[Ed.Kloonk]

Everybody makes mistakes, just that Dave has been consistent in having a backup that is current. More importantly, that backup works! +1000% for Dave having that, and for Gnif spending his weekend hours and into the wee hours to fix things.
Dave, you do not pay Gnif enough.

With hindsight maybe we should have gone back several days in the backup and just ate a couple of thousand new posts maybe (the forum gets about 800 new posts a day IIRC), it seems that something was screwed up.

And piss members off even more that have posted in great detail over that time ?
Whatever time your little faux pas has cost you members collectively have lost more.

Please remember this any time admin work is carried out.

I don't think that is being very fair at all.

[EEVblog]

Everybody makes mistakes, just that Dave has been consistent in having a backup that is current. More importantly, that backup works! +1000% for Dave having that, and for Gnif spending his weekend hours and into the wee hours to fix things.
Dave, you do not pay Gnif enough.

With hindsight maybe we should have gone back several days in the backup and just ate a couple of thousand new posts maybe (the forum gets about 800 new posts a day IIRC), it seems that something was screwed up.

And piss members off even more that have posted in great detail over that time ?
Whatever time your little faux pas has cost you members collectively have lost more.
Please remember this any time admin work is carried out.

Seriously?
It looks like this was a bug in the forum software, it wasn't me being reckless pushing the wrong button, it was an unforeseen issue. Shit happens and we did the best we could to revover from it.
It's been a rather streesful few days and I don't appreciate this response.

[SeanB]

Seriously?
It looks like this was a bug in the forum software, it wasn't me being reckless pushing the wrong button, it was an unforeseen issue. Shit happens and we did the best we could to revover from it.
It's been a rather streesful few days and I don't appreciate this response.

Dave, you cannot please all. Just smile, think of them as if they are again off the lithium, and carry on as usual. I would post him a pouch cell to take in place of it, but SAPO will not cooperate with sending dangerous goods in the post.

[EEVblog]

My missing post (from browser history):
3561403 in https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/12v-l-e-d-light-bar/

Was that post in the last day or so?
I see no history of any deleted post, so I presume it was recent and lost in the reversion to backup.

For those unaware of how this work, the forum server runs on dual redundant boxes. The loss of either box hardware will not impact the forum.
The loss of both boxes as happened in the recent data centre fire results in the forum going down, but at least people can't post and add more stuff that might get lost.
Backups are peformed daily and stored in multiple offsite facilities.
If anything technical happens to the forum in terms of database problems, corruption etc, then the forum may actually continue to operate and we only find out at a later point that something is wrong, during which time people continue to post etc. If the issue can't be fixed, or fixed easily then we may have to resort to reinstalling the backup. That means we could lose anywhere from a few hours to 24 hours worth of posts, or more if we don't notice the issue in a timely fashion. In this case it's not possibel to not lose posts, it's just a matter of how many.
We had the unfortunate latter situation this time where I did not notice anything until i saw the "has anyone lost 5% of their posts?" thread, by which time many thousands of posts were likely to have been made, and it took time to anaylse what was happening and lock down the forum.

[tggzzz]

Whatever time your little faux pas has cost you members collectively have lost more.

Please remember this any time admin work is carried out.

I suspect Dave, gnif et al are more than aware of that!

I don't see your comment being either amusing, enlightening, entertaining, or helpful.

[Muttley Snickers]

We are all very grateful for the forum and acknowledge the effort involved in keeping it running smoothly but it's still a bit confusing as to what happened to many peoples posts. The 5% thread you made reference to which no longer exists included a few members who also experienced multiple missing posts or a questionable post count. At the time tautech had lost over five hundred posts in the matter of a day or so, I believe this is why he was so concerned.

[beanflying]

The opportunity to break an SMF or for that matter most forums in the backroom when you are the Admin is absolute and fairly easy to do as you have ALL permissions enabled. When I was developing my last SMF based project I was running a dummy forum with all the same code and mods fitted and anything potentially harmful got tested before getting near the main forum.

Bulk removing 10k+posts was always a dangerous thing and if that now I gather ex member wanted it done then it should have fallen on them to filter the content they wanted removed or it should have been left in place so the threads in time still read 'sensibly'.

[Ian.M]

My missing post (from browser history):
3561403 in https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/12v-l-e-d-light-bar/

Was that post in the last day or so?
I see no history of any deleted post, so I presume it was recent and lost in the reversion to backup.

It would have been within 12 hours of the last visible post in that topic.  Reply #2 on: April 29, 2021, 06:47:02
IIRC there was a further reply from the O.P. as well.  I believe the O.P. got what he needed from the discussion, so please don't prioritize rescuing that thread manually.

It would seem that *either* you don't have any easy/automated way to extract new/edited posts made since the most recent backup so they can be reinstated after the restore, *or* the database was too badly corrupted for that to be practical.   

It would have been nice if the extremely terse SMF error message while the forum was fully down linked to a status update page similar to the one you put up during the full site outage.

[EEVblog]

We are all very grateful for the forum and acknowledge the effort involved in keeping it running smoothly but it's still a bit confusing as to what happened to many peoples posts. The 5% thread you made reference to which no longer exists included a few members who also experienced multiple missing posts or a questionable post count.

That thread was posted atfer the last backup snapshot so of course it would be gone, no mystery there.
As to some other posts, I'm still trying to figure that out, but at the time we had to make a call to:
a) Use the backup or try to repair, we ultimately decided on the backup after some investigation.
and then
b) Which backup to use. We weren't sure of timing when the issues too place so we picked the last backup to minimise the number of lost posts. But as it now turns out that backup database may have still had some risidual issues we are only just now finding out about. At the time the backup did indeed look good from what we could see, so we ran with it.

Unfortunately we might now be in a position where there are some residual post issues leftover, and the only solution to that would be the go to an even older backup and losing even more posts. At some point we have to decide to just take the loss and move forward.

[tggzzz]

There's an argument that if a poster can't tell you their post is missing, then the post was of little consequence.

That's certainly valid for my posts!