Some of you may have noticed that your site is missing posts. Others of you may notice that your blog is completely gone. Both are the result of a very unfortunate accident that occurred when the Systems Group tried to restore the Voices site to its state at 6 AM this morning.
As you know we were upgrading the software this morning. This afternoon it was discovered by Dr. Hayward that some users could not post to their blogs and we began investigating the issue. In the process it was decided that a reversion might be necessary. When the Systems Group restored the database containing all the user and post information, they discovered it was corrupt. As they looked for a clean backup they discovered that all backups after Sept. 10 were corrupt and so the earliest version they could restore to is Sept 10.
We are aware that roughly 40 users and hence 40 blogs were lost in this incident. Unfortunately it looks like there is no way to recover the lost users and blogs. It also means that all posts written between Sept. 10 and this morning are gone. We know that this means that several class assignments that were written as blog entries are also gone. We will continue to work with the Systems Group to try to recover as much data as possible, but be aware that it is not likely any more data will be recovered.
In the coming days we will be working with the Systems Group to develop procedures to ensure that such an accident does not occur in the future. Once these procedures have been determined we will post them to this site for the community’s benefit.