Hi All,

I’m frustrated, and I’m sure there will be plenty of other folk frustrated at my recent discovery that the Domain Hosting company had overwritten part of our website with a backup taken in March 2022. This event occurred at the end of June, and almost took out our Club website altogether.

Issue is that all discussion topics, replies, membership requests and changes, and additions to members Photo Albums have been lost between March 16th and June 25th (approx).

For those of you who are interested here is an explanation of what happened. The web hosting company that I pay to host our Club website performed an upgrade to our service. To do this they backed up our website and copied it onto the new faster platform. This would have been fine, except someone (who can’t be traced) managed to then copy over some database files that had been taken at a previous upgrade (March 2022) over the live website.

The result was…

* none of the photo albums worked, including displaying photos already added
* major background development I’d undertaken in early April was corrupted
* the Forum database was corrupted and was unusable
* the membership database suddenly contained duplicates of many of the newer members, which would have prevented their access to the website.

It took over a week, with many separate contacts to the web hosting company’s support team, for me to find someone who would take the time to walk through everything they had done to our website, step by tiny step. It was through this walk through that I was able to call out to him that a step he described was actually something that should never have happened, as the source of the backup was an outdated version of the website (March 2022). He was then able to do some work arounds, to overwrite again the corrupted areas of the website with the newer copy of the files. This action returned the website to fully correct functioning, although some data was lost (discussion topic, replies and member application and changes).

You might ask why I didn’t just restore the website for the regular backups…. well, it turns out you can’t restore a database on top of a corrupted database in the way our website’s databases had been corrupted (I tried, oh I spend days trying….).

Well, we’ve no more domain level upgrades planned (I can’t actually afford to pay for anything better than we have, and rely on donations to pay for what we have).

Thanks for reading

Laurence