My account was erased

The latest outage deleted my account. (I'm trusting that this was unintentional... <img src="/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />)

I just recreated it with the same username and email address, so I'm assuming it really was erased.

My account and my posts all seem to have been erased, too...

M <img src="/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

Maybe that's temporary. I mean, whoever's doing the hosting for this site should have backups. It may just take 'em a while to recover.

If ETS needs space for redundant offsite database backups, let us know. There are several geeks on here with servers that could easily keep copies of database snapshots, site content, etc. All of this can be done automagically and over the 'net.

The SQL seemed to be hosed for several days - it took a while for my account to come back online, but seems to be working now. Sucks when things go down, but it happens in the tech world. If you remade your account, you may not get back your posts count and other things.

I've asked Dave to look into the problem. <shrug> I really do hate computers... <sigh>

Dave does a daily back-up automagically as part of their normal back-up process. Sometimes in the haste to get things back up and running it doesn't get used and/or stuff happens.

Understand something, please. The server, bandwidth, etc. is donated free of charge to ETS Foundation by Dave, and has been since day one. We get the benefit of virtually unlimited bandwidth available to us, necessary to serve the paying clients at max load, so it's almost always fast. The down side of this is that we are a very low priority when the paying accounts are screaming for attention. Dave has to do most of the ETS stuff himself, as well as run the company, etc. Moreover, increasing work load means he's got way too much to do. Thus, upgrading the forum software, for example, just doesn't get done on a timely basis since it is a major effort. Many other projects are on the back burner. Because of security concerns, I can't have anyone else work on the site, despite the many offers of assiatnce, though Dave has plans to fix that--sometime. The cost of what we have would be a fortune elsewhere and I question if I could even afford to run ETS if I had to pay. No easy answer.

Thanks for your understanding.

Sure, Doug. I hope I didn't sound like it was easy, or that you should let us help... but if you need us, we're here.