artomatic website

[rebecca]

Hi - Aaron is aware the Artomatic website is down and I imagine he will be posting an announcement after he talks to Sondra and co. some more. He will post an update later, but I wanted to post a notice that we're aware of the situation so we can cut down on some of the email traffic (tho for right now artomatic emails are also bouncing).

Thanks for your patience, Aaron will post an update so that we have accurate dissemination of information.

[atz]

Basically, our server went down, and our hosted backups are corrupt. This is, needless to say, bad.

My most recent working, complete backup -- that wasn't stored on site5's servers -- is from April 11. As soon as I can I'll restore the site to that point. There are pieces of the site -- some parts of the catalog, the code for website picks -- that we may have more recent backups of. And there's always google's cache.

That said, email should still be working, since it's on a different server. So feel free to keep bugging volunteer@artomatic.org (sorry Rebecca) and web@artomatic.org (sorry Tracy and, well, me) and any other Artomatic email address you'd like.

The hosting company's comments on this incident are here: http://forums.site5.com/showthread.php?t=16794

There's not much else to do. I'll try and post updates here, though, frankly, I'm not expecting any more good news.
  -- Aaron

[rania]

Oh my, I'm so sorry. You don't get any breaks, do you? 

[rebecca]

I think Aaron should get ALL the leftover beer. Not that there was much, but the poor guy could use a drink, I'd bet.

I'm just going to stay in denial for a while. Cozy here. 

[rania]

Yeah, and the red bull.

But maybe not together.

[Tracy Lee]

Yeah, and the red bull.

But maybe not together.

I had a energy drink around 2:30 cause I was feeling rather sluggish. I just woke up with the keyboard  imprint on my face.  So much for red Bull and their wings.

[rania]

You might have been better off with one of these:
http://www.sparks.com

[scenicartisan]

SPARKS!

[rania]

Yeah, and like most stuff that's good for you, it tastes like cough syrup the first time, and the second time it's everything awesome.



Side note: Apparently if you drip the bright orange liquid on your friend's white carpet, it turns black after a few weeks. So they tell me. This little detail makes it sound like I'm very guilty, but I promise it wasn't me.

[danspix]

Basically, our server went down, and our hosted backups are corrupt. This is, needless to say, bad.

There's not much else to do. I'll try and post updates here, though, frankly, I'm not expecting any more good news.
  -- Aaron

Bummer! Anything any of us can do to help? Hope you had a good portion of it backed up.  Artomatic is almost over and you really didn't need this right now. Thanks to Artdc there is somewhere to go to communicate. This forum is almost as vital to all of us as the Artomatic web site.

[rebecca]

I'm sure Aaron will post if there's any assistance he can use - thanks for the offer. Sadly, it appears only a small portion of participating artists have info also loaded here in the galleries so there's the catalog (which captured past participants too, and was a nice compendium of links and images on one site), all the performing artists (as many as the visual artists captured for the 1st time), volunteer rosters, volunteer reminder emailing doohicky service thing, picks lists...oh, let's not think about it right now. Denial. Warm and cozy denial, that's where I'm living while aaron does the heavy lifting. (thank you, Aaron!)

That was highly paranthetical, even for me.

[atz]

anyone have a good way to get our stuff out of the google cache?

I could reconstruct most of the site if I could get:

http://www.artomatic.org/node/1 through http://www.artomatic.org/node/2000
http://www.artomatic.org/user/1 through http://www.artomatic.org/user/1000

... and about 25 pick lists; I have their URls if anyone can figure out how to scrape them out of the cache.

You can do a google search on cache:http://www.artomatic.org/user/xyz to get a single page, but if I try to automate it google complains. Any thoughts?
I'm hesitant to restore my April 11 backups for fear I'll wipe out google's cache, which, otherwise, would last a month or so.

[Jesse]

That's really a good question.  I can only think of the most painful way which is to go manually.

[jron]

Basically, our server went down, and our hosted backups are corrupt. This is, needless to say, bad.

There's not much else to do. I'll try and post updates here, though, frankly, I'm not expecting any more good news.
  -- Aaron

Bummer! Anything any of us can do to help? Hope you had a good portion of it backed up.  Artomatic is almost over and you really didn't need this right now. Thanks to Artdc there is somewhere to go to communicate. This forum is almost as vital to all of us as the Artomatic web site.

I have NEVER seen a webhost that makes backups at all much less valid ones no matter what they advertise. They ALL say they do, yet somehow, you can never seem to get your data back. There is always some excuse. The truth is, they DON'T backup your stuff.

Basic rule #1: Backup your sh*t yourself!!!  NEVER TRUST A WEBHOST TO DO IT FOR YOU!!!  I have been burned by this countless times over the years. NO webhost can be trusted!

-john

[Pyrite]

I have NEVER seen a webhost that makes backups at all much less valid ones no matter what they advertise. They ALL say they do, yet somehow, you can never seem to get your data back. There is always some excuse. The truth is, they DON'T backup your stuff.

Basic rule #1: Backup your sh*t yourself!!!  NEVER TRUST A WEBHOST TO DO IT FOR YOU!!!  I have been burned by this countless times over the years. NO webhost can be trusted!

-john

[/quote]


Aaaaaaa-grreeeeed. Webhosts generally suck. Trust me. I do this for a living. We have a (company) worktron actually stick in the tape, and run our backups. We do not trust our Server Farm to do shiite. Hell, they loose power all the time- and they're owned by the frickin' power company. 

[Tracy Lee]

normally all the websites I work on I keep the originals on my harddrive which I update and then ftp to the server, and then manually make regular back-ups onto dvd for the client. The artomatic website - however - is a content management system and everything I worked on was done directly on the server.  So the whole "well, i'll just ftp the site files again" doesn't work in this case, at least not for me.

FWIW - they lost everything. All their web clients lost their sites - not just us. Luckily this happened after the event closed - imagine the round the clock nightmare that we'd be dealing with if this was week 2 of Artomatic and the site disappeared.

[Jesse]

Tracy.  I know.  It's so important to back up..


I can't beleive that the host would be that careless.  I know some hosts actually offer a backup service, while it may cost a little extra, I advise everyone to look into it. 

Imagine the nightmare if this was an e-commerce website and valued sales data was lost.  Pissed off customers, it makes my head spin. 

[rania]

You should be able to see the source code through google cache, and find text there, but google probably doesn't have the images saved, and doesn't always save everything. And whatever it does have would probably have to be reformatted.


I agree with Tracy, good thing this happened after the event is officially over.

[Jesse]

If it takes manual labor, I'd be glad to mass mail some folks to help find afew people to help..  Maybe split things up.  10 people working to restore 40 users each = 400 artists?

[atz]

I have a backup of all the source code -- everything I've uploaded, of course.

The problem is that it's a CMS -- lots of people edited the site (including all of the artists!) and I didn't back up all of *their* data ... except back in early April.

If I can save the source out of Google's cache, it's fairly simple to pull out the part of the page that's "content" and put it back into the CMS. But there are 3000-some individual pages on the site -- each artist's postings, each user page, each news item, each artist pick, each event in the event calendar -- where I need the content in order to recreate it.

I'll keep trying until Sunday. I'm pretty handy with perl and should be able to come up with something; and few people uploaded images to the catalog after opening. The volunteer stuff is going to be the biggest loss. But it's real disheartening nonetheless.

This webhost had come pretty highly recommended on the drupal site, and unlike some other hosts, their servers were real snappy for running drupal (which is a total CPU & database pig -- each web page requires some 40 database queries to construct). And, of course, we'd paid for them to keep backups. They just... were corrupted.

Anyway, they realize they messed up and will refund a year's worth of hosting fees. But that's the best we can do. That, and find a new host.

-- Aaron