Beaufort County NOW had a Near Catastrophic Day, but we are Recovering (Updated - Recovered) | Eastern North Carolina Now

For the next few days, beginning January 4, 2016 (the day we went down and database tables corrupted), we shall endeavor to recover, and we shall succeed.

    Not only did our server go down, but we lost nearly two and one half months of data, in short, all of our well considered posts from about 70 days were gone. Fortunately, some will be recovered today from our surrogate sites: Pitt County NOW, Dare County NOW, and others; but, some will have to be recovered from a forensic process of lifting from Google cached source code, and even then, we shall lose some posts.

    What happened yesterday, while we struggle to get the site back up, is that around ten (60%) database tables were "corrupted" by external forces; and by that sinister force, we lost this significant content. In all our years, this has never happened, but well signals to us one truth: We need to get the HELL AWAY from this server provider, so that changeover will be yet another inconvenience to be endured as we move such a huge site, as BCN is, to a more stable home. We will accomplish this as soon as we are recovered.

    Fortunately, if there is such a thing as fortune right now, all of many our uploaded images, and there are many 10's of thousands, were preserved; as was our new 'leading edge' mapping system, our headers, our banners and our pages. If there is another silver lining here, it is by this adversity, we hone our skills, and we steel our resolve to continue to create and maintain, the top online publication in northeastern North Carolina. I reiterate from moments past, this very special Beaufort County NOW is primarily our prototype, it is our baby, and it will continue.

    In closing, I would like to thank my "No. 1 Guy", and creative partner, Man Cave Dave (David Winstead), for his calm, his resolve to correct an interminable situation, and his devotion to continued excellence in process, and my boy in the trenches - The Kid - as we quickly dig our way out of this predicament.


    Stan Deatherage,
     Accounts Manager   •   Publisher of BCN   •   President of Symbiotic Networks, Inc.
     SNI# (252) 946-1132   •   cell# (252) 944-3905   •   stan@beaufortcountynow.com
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Comments

( January 29th, 2016 @ 12:06 am )
 
By sometime Sunday, January 31, we will have mixed in all of the recovered posts that we found, and are now sitting unpublished, waiting to be reintroduced.

For all of our contributors that are also sitting in the queue, or still in my e-mail, just know that I aim to clear away all of this backlog so your posts will not be masked, or weighed down by the last reintroduction of the recovered lost posts.
( January 27th, 2016 @ 1:45 am )
 
It has been over three weeks since that fateful January 4th day, and now I can conclusively promise that we have located almost every lost post that we sought to find.

If anyone knows of a missing post that we have not found, please let me know its full title, and we will search a bit more; otherwise, we have finished the harvesting of the lost crop.
( January 19th, 2016 @ 1:09 am )
 
Thanks Alex.

I am still working on it, and still finding lost posts when I have time.

Remarkably, the internet believes that these are new posts, once they are re-submitted, and this months traffic represents that they are re-accepted as significant posts.
( January 18th, 2016 @ 7:38 am )
 
Wow! I just found "Beaufort County NOW had a Near Catastrophic Day, but we are Recovering" & read all the comments. Did not know about all the hell you have been going through. Good job!
( January 16th, 2016 @ 6:25 pm )
 
Servers and their software are kind of like the human body - a complex thinking machine - that can be very fallible, but with the proper guidance can be saved and improved.
( January 16th, 2016 @ 4:54 pm )
 
It prompted me to create a post about digital storage which is in the queue for your review. Most people don't realist how fragile the electronic storage media is when only a speck of dust or a electrical hiccup can wrech havoc. Glad to see you are back to 95+%
( January 16th, 2016 @ 11:24 am )
 
I'm glad you see this B.T. I wish we had backed up more of recent, rather than importing to another surrogate site: pittcountynow.com ; because that did not work out so well.

One must learn from their mistakes, as we continue to do, or cry often, and I am not so good at that whole crying thing. There is no crying in online publishing!

When I was a commissioner, I use to believe that when it it did not go one's way in governing (especially for a Conservative in a non Conservative community), one learned something, and moved past it a little, but also: There is no crying in governing!

An then now, there is Blubbering Barack. That may create a whole new paradigm for Socialist Liberals.
( January 16th, 2016 @ 8:37 am )
 
Good news! For people who have never had a hard drive crash with no back up or a very old backup, it is more than just losing a few pictures or emails. If it is a business computer you are essentially dead in the water. I am glad to hear that you have found a solution.
( January 16th, 2016 @ 5:17 am )
 
Once piece of good news.

My No. 1 Guy says that we no longer need to move to another more expensive, but far slower server. Our current faster server, where we wish to remain (it has a solid state hard drive, which are difficult to locate elsewhere), does not have a control panel, which makes controlling the server more difficult; however, my No. 1 Guy has created a fix. In the recent past, session files were building up to the point that it did, literally, choke the service from the server, thereby, ultimately, corrupting 10 of our database tables in the bargain.

Now, we have discovered a means to clear the session files, daily if desired, and we will complete back-ups weekly, or twice weekly, of our entire site, and all should be well. We will be vigilant to do this, so northeastern North Carolina's top site shall run smoothly as intended from here on out.

Servers are a pain in the ass, but that is how the internet works. Servers are its backbone.
( January 13th, 2016 @ 3:34 am )
 
Still cleaning up, about 94% complete.
( January 12th, 2016 @ 4:12 am )
 
We are about 90% complete here, with clean-up the emphasis.

If anyone has a post that is lost, please notify me with the title and there is about a 80% chance that I will be able to find it somewhere, and fairly fast, so you will not be putting me out.
( January 11th, 2016 @ 2:04 pm )
 
So far, we have recovered about 480 posts, and I am about 84% done with all this, so I shall continue to persevere until I am satisfied that we have done all that we can do.

A slight silver lining to all of this, and I do not suggest this for anyone; however, the truth here, because of all this attention to find posts and re-submit them to the Search Engines, we have had the largest traffic week since our inception years ago.
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