[John Jarrold]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

Terribly terribly sorry about chronicles being down this weekend - the situation has been a total nightmare.

What began as a series of small bugs on Friday turned into a fully-fledged database crash on Saturday. The result was, all 1.2 million forum posts were wiped from the forum database.

The server chronicles is hosted on was supposed to have daily and weekly backups with the hosting company - and the rest of Saturday was spent discovering that, in fact, they hadn't been operating any backups whatsoever.

So that left my own 2 month old backup from the big upgrade in August when I introduced the new social groups, blogging, and photo uploads feature to chronicles.

Today was just a nightmare of a day as I tried to move the site and ran into more problems than I solved - there is just so much data on chronicles it is not an easy site to move.

Finally, I was able to get my old 1GB backup uploaded and inserted into a new database, and we are now running on that.

Unfortunately, it was only complete to August 2nd - everything since that upgrade is irrevocably lost. That means all new members will nee to re-register, all posts, threads, social groups, images, and even blog entries, are gone.

I'm not a happy chappy, and that's an understatement. I'm consoled only by the fact that the majority of chronicles was saved - at least we lost only 2 months of posts, not 5 years.

In the meantime, we are now back online, the hosting company has daily and weekly backups set up, and I'll also get my own custom back-up script set up.

I also have some bigger plans for chronicles, and plan to get them unrolling towards the end of the year.

In the meantime, I think I need a holiday ...

Having been away last weekend, I'm only just aware of this, Brian...terribly sorry, and all the best.