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Site Roll-Back and Attachment Loss/Recapture

Sean Engle

Your Friendly Administrator
Administrator
Founder
Welcome (back) to v.4.2.2 of EricsonYachts.org! :egrin:


Many of you may recall our loss of 2/3 of our attachments last week (Sept 29/30, 2015) after upgrading to the new 4.2.3 version. Rather than recount it here, I'll just post the dialog here (leaving out the expletives occurring later, etc):

Sean S. Engle
27th Sep 2015 09:17pm
Hello -

You guys may have already heard about this from others, but I just discovered the issue: We are missing about 2/3 of our attachments after upgrading to 4.2.3.

After discovering the loss, I thought it was something I had done - however after looking at the Attachment Stats and the file structure itself, I am finding that the File Stats say we have 7,123 attachments at about 513 mb while the count in the file structure itself (in the thread_attachments folder which I created years ago when I moved them out of the db) points to about 15,600 attachments at about 738 mb...

So, after Googling this issue, I am seeing others are having attachment issues after going to 4.2.3 - so could you please advise what I should do to correct this issue? In the posts where the attachments are missing (where they were known to have been), I don't see any reference to them whatsoever...

Thanks,
Sean Engle

Mark Bowland
29th Sep 2015 03:18pm
Hello

This is a rather complex issue surrounding attachment "refcount" values in the database, and the fact that yours were incorrectly marked as being unused or no longer required in a post.

In the past, vBulletin was always supposed to delete these unused attachments automatically on a cron job. It never worked however. In 4.2.3 this bug got fixed, with the unfortunate result that sites like yours where the refcounts were wrong, lost all its attachments.

In 4.2.4 (still in development), a check has now been added to prevent this happening. This doesn't help you much at this point, however, as all your attachments have been deleted.

Your best bet at this point is to ask your host to restore a full backup - including files if your attachments were stored there - and then upgrade no higher than 4.2.2 (as the problem didn't occur in 4.2.2).

I'm sorry that this is not an ideal solution, but the attachments will now be gone.

Kind Regards
Mark Bowland
vBulletin Support​

Thankfully, after the last hacking we went through, where we lost nearly a year worth of data, I instituted new backup procedures, which when combined with our host's system backups and the timing of discovery of this issue (thanks Loren!) - has enabled us to step back to the site just prior to the upgrade on September 4th. After this little adventure, I'll now be adding to that regime, and our directory structure will be backed up as well.

So, here's the deal now: The site has been restored to 09/01/15 - meaning that all posts, blogs, new accounts, etc. which were created/posted between 09/01/15 and 10/03/15 are no longer in this database. If you were working in an active thread, please restart that thread so that others can find you. If you opened a new account in that period, you'll need to do it again.

The URL for the site remains the same: http://www.ericsonyachts.org/infoexchange If you had difficulty locating us today, my apologies, however we've had to do lots of directory shifting and database creation/restoring to get back on track, so... The site will not move from this location again - so fix your shortcuts to the link above, and you'll be good to go.

If we need do to pull things from the old 4.2.3 site, we can do that - but it is a piecemeal issue, as that database was significantly altered during the 4.2.3 upgrade (so an easy dump of the 09/01/15-09/31/15 data into this 4.2.2 site is just not possible). BUT - we have all our old attachments back! So - if you really need something from the old site, email me - and we'll work it out.

So - again:

  • Site has been restored to 09/01/15
  • All posts, blogs, attachments, user accounts, etc - added from 09/01/15 to 10/03/15 are not in this database, and will have to be recreated, etc.
  • Access to the 4.2.3. version of this site is possible for the administrator - however I will not be opening that site back up again. If there is something you need from the old site, please email me.
  • I know this is a pain - but be grateful that we have our attachments back - and have not lost 15 years of work.
  • Version 4.2.4 is in development right now - and vBulletin will be releasing it soon. Version 4.2.4 will correct the in-line image problem we've seen, and it will remove the attachment blowout that 4.2.3 causes. The publisher is under a lot of pressure on this - so as soon as it's released and we can test it, then we'll go to the new version.

We'll work out the other issues going forward - and I will be spending more time to get things back the way they should be (including the archives).

Thanks!
//sse
 
Last edited:

kari

Member III
Great work Sean! Yes I did notice and hope others do what time your post went out . . . . .
 

olsenjohn

John Olsen
Blogs Author
Thank You!

Thank you very much for all the effort you put into fixing and upgrading the site. It takes real dedication and commitment.

And it was not a pain to go back and fix my blogs. Took me just a few minutes to reattach the pictures as they were still in each of the blog attachments which meant no reloading. Just a few clicks and they were reinserted.

Thanks Again!!!

John Olsen
 

Sean Engle

Your Friendly Administrator
Administrator
Founder
Sun Oct 4th Maintenance - Shut Down at 9 PM PST

Tonight I'll need to take the site down temporarily to re-set the file structure - so all our old links work.

Once this is done, the site's path should be just as it was before all of this started...

//sse
 

Sean Engle

Your Friendly Administrator
Administrator
Founder
Oh - and thanks for the compliments. I guess few people noticed this - which is funny, as it was actually more serious than when we got hacked and lost a years worth of data!
 
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