Gamingforce: IT'S ALIVE

Dammit, this place just refuses to die.

I'll stick the epic recovery process in this post later. It was really rough in the first week but we never gave up. Thank you all for sticking with us!

Edit: Here's what happened.

At approximately 8:00pm CST on Jan 17, our server’s primary hard drive failed. Initially I thought it was a scheduled downtime, which indeed was announced on the forums of our host (Layeredtech). But after two hours the site still wasn't responding, so Miles put in a reboot ticket.

While we were waiting, this transpired in the mod channel. It is 100% genuine.

Quote:

[12:16:03] <@Gigablah> still no news from layeredtech eh
[12:16:22] <@RacinReaver> they :bobo:ed us
[12:17:27] <@miles> server is corrupted. They'll have to wip it and reinstall freebsd
[12:17:31] <@miles> wipe*
[12:18:55] <@Gigablah> ...
[12:19:02] <@Gigablah> i hope we have a backup
[12:19:14] <@Gigablah> can they retrieve the data?
[12:19:17] <@miles> I'm just kidding. loool
[12:19:26] <@miles> blah goes into serious mode.
[12:19:36] <@Gigablah> i'm going to fly to california and rape you
[12:19:44] <@Gigablah> with a wrench

Later we were informed by a tech that the hard drive had failed, and it was "impossible" to recover the data. All hell broke loose, etc.

Anyway, Miles did have a mid-december backup of GFF, but VGMdb wasn't so lucky (notice that I was hoping we had a backup?). In the end, seeing that Layeredtech wasn't bothered to look into the problem any further, Miles decided to just get the dead drive off them. The tech discussed it with the manager.

300 BUX

Well, they had the data, so what could we do except bend over? We coughed up the cash and Miles received the drive the week after.

This was when the VGMdb people came into the picture. I'll just link to Liontamer's VGFrequency blog post about it (FYI, Liontamer is the head submissions evaluator at Overclocked Remix and is a staff member at VGMdb). Basically, Starla of #ocremix came down from the heavens and bailed out our asses. Since she works for a major data recovery center, she had various vendor contacts, and soon she was sourcing for spare parts for Miles to use in a self-recovery attempt (some of us wanted to just send it directly to the company, which would have incurred a far higher cost -- at least a few grand.) Since the dead drive wasn't spinning up, a possible way to fix it was to transfer the logic board from another working identical model. She located one within 30 minutes!

Anyway, after another week, Miles received the working identical drive. The following is taken from Miles' post on Serious Business, which was also replicated on VGFrequency:

Originally Posted by Miles

Starla, you are fucking awesome. Everyone needs to give starla a hug. Anyways, I picked up the drive from her earlier today and after my company recognition dinner I decided to tackle the drive.



New one Starla gave me on the left and our actual 300 dollar broken server drive layeredfaggots sent me.



Let’s begin the operation. Had to use a T08 to get this sucker off.



Awww. There it is. This thing will save us a few grand.



Attached it in our broken drive and screwed it in.



Time for a quick test.

Oh you fucking liar you. Because WHAT is THIS?



Never say never you jerk. I just proved you wrong!

I won't bore you with the database restoration details, since you're looking at the result anyway. Rejoice!


A couple of notes:

• We're now with a host (ServInt) that provides regular backups, so the next hard drive crash will result in much shorter downtime.
• Miles still has a few gigs of attachments to upload so some attachments may be broken for the time being.
• If there's any database error, inform me immediately.
• Total recovery cost: $436 (thanks, Starla of #ocremix!)
• Total downtime: 29 days

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Looks like the DNS propagated fast. I changed it barely 15 minutes ago.

How ya doing, buddy?

vbSEO is temporarily deactivated (so some links in posts may be broken) until I get the updated product XML from Miles.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Thanks for the vbSEO stuff Miles. I've reactivated it, so nice URLs are back.

Apparently it's also fixed the broken images in the AJAX new postbit append.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Just updated the first post with details.


This is what saved GFF:



I was speaking idiomatically.

WHO IS THIS IMPOSTOR

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Not without violating vBulletin's ToS

But I can probably extract the posts from the database manually, if you need access to specific threads.

FELIPE NO