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Empty Artwork Archives are now deleted

TMF Jeff

TMF owner and co-founder
Joined
Apr 2, 2001
Messages
26,899
Points
63
This was a sad task - looking at all those names of artists and titles of pictures made me very nostalgic, and it bummed me out that all that great content is lost, at least here on the Forum.

Archives that had lost some but not all of their content, I individually deleted empty threads while leaving any that still had content in them. And in cases where people had used links instead of attachments, I only deleted the ones where the link was no longer active. But a lot was lost, and that just sucks.

...

To recap the situation, a few years ago we had a virus on the forum's server that attacked our attachment database, deleting a lot of our attached files. Unfortunately, by the time we noticed it the forum had already run its backup, possibly several times because we don't know how long the virus was around before we detected it.

One of the harder hit locations on the forum was the Artwork Archive (the next forum down from this one on the main index) because the virus seemed to start its attack with the oldest files and work its way forward, probably as a way to avoid detection as long as possible.

To our credit, we saved a lot - by far most of our data was saved. But we lost a lot too, and cleaning up the Archives really reminded me of that loss. I hope someday we're able to recover all that great art.

...

We now have a dual-backup system where we backup the forum once a month as usual, but also we do twice-yearly backups on a separate SSD drive, and that backup only happens after we've verified the integrity of the copy.

So if the same thing were to happen again, we would lose a few months of time because we'd have to revert back to the most recent bi-annual backup. But we wouldn't lose giant chunks of data like we did during that virus attack, and what we did lose would be recent attachments that would presumably be easier to recover because they would have come from active TMF members who would be around to re-post their stuff.

...

If you're a currently active artist on the TMF with a decent sized catalog, and you would like an archive of your own, contact me by private message and we will set you up with one.

Edit: Or if you're an artist who isn't that active anymore but wants to showcase their past work, contact me for that as well!

Thanks!
Jeff
 
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