Welcome back to the forum everyone.
It's been 2 weeks since Marie decided to delete the server because she was angry at Nate. Those of you who frequented irc.metroid2002.com probably had seen Marie during May and June, and probably wondered who she was ... I know I did, and nobody would tell me. The reason is because it was 'her' big secret that she is in fact a man... the same man that was deskjockey_. A case of multiple personality disorder. Marie emerged early this year and got stronger as people talked to her on IRC, eventually "killing" the dj personality. I'm not sure how Nate first learned of this, but it was something so bizarre he couldn't keep it to himself so he told his girlfriend Rachel, but Rachel knew to not let Marie know that she knew. Well it was 2 weeks ago that the shit hit the fan and Marie found out and proceeded to delete the entire server. Apparently she didn't realize that now that she has no access to the server, we're free to tell the world about this... so, deleting the server sure failed to keep her secret.
Nate had to pay for a fresh install from his provider, which they do on a new disk, leaving the old one in the system for 2 days. Now I'm going to get technical so maybe you'll glaze over this part, but if you really want to love me (and I know you do) you should read it. While Nate had backups of all the pages and mp4s of the server, the last time a forum backup was done was on May 1. Also, Nate's friend ant had a lot of .zip files he didn't have backups of. So, we needed a way to get them back... but with everything deleted, that's not an easy task. We had to do a raw copy of the old drive onto a new one, resulting in a 55.9GB file. Then nate downloaded it, which took about 4 days since the connection kept failing, and I started to work on a program to scan the disk image for zip files and forum fragments. As you've seen, Nate got all the site content back up last weekend. We could have had the forum back at the same time but it would have only been with posts up to May 1. Nobody wanted that... so I got busy. I investigated the format of the database files that resulted from the restore of the may 1 backup, then searched for indications of those files in the disk image. As I expected, the files were in many fragments. The smallest fragment size was only 4k, and I spent all of last weekend and monday working on finding the next fragment and pasting them together to reform the file. I wish I could bill Marie for the time I put in at $20+ an hour. When we tried to import the files I assembled, the database gave a lot of errors, so I had to check them over again. I found some parts I'd missed, and there were still errors. Finally today, after I figured out the format of the files, I wrote my own program to scan them and easily found where the errors were. In both cases it was because I'd accidentally pasted the same fragment twice. At the same time I got the idea that we could easily (compared to what I'd been doing) re-integrate the old posts from last year which were accidentally pruned, and then saved on oldforum/. And now, here we are. Everything is restored except for a few poll topics which lost their polls, because they're in another file which is so small I don't have any hints to find it.
Hope everyone continues as if nothing had happened!
It's been 2 weeks since Marie decided to delete the server because she was angry at Nate. Those of you who frequented irc.metroid2002.com probably had seen Marie during May and June, and probably wondered who she was ... I know I did, and nobody would tell me. The reason is because it was 'her' big secret that she is in fact a man... the same man that was deskjockey_. A case of multiple personality disorder. Marie emerged early this year and got stronger as people talked to her on IRC, eventually "killing" the dj personality. I'm not sure how Nate first learned of this, but it was something so bizarre he couldn't keep it to himself so he told his girlfriend Rachel, but Rachel knew to not let Marie know that she knew. Well it was 2 weeks ago that the shit hit the fan and Marie found out and proceeded to delete the entire server. Apparently she didn't realize that now that she has no access to the server, we're free to tell the world about this... so, deleting the server sure failed to keep her secret.
Nate had to pay for a fresh install from his provider, which they do on a new disk, leaving the old one in the system for 2 days. Now I'm going to get technical so maybe you'll glaze over this part, but if you really want to love me (and I know you do) you should read it. While Nate had backups of all the pages and mp4s of the server, the last time a forum backup was done was on May 1. Also, Nate's friend ant had a lot of .zip files he didn't have backups of. So, we needed a way to get them back... but with everything deleted, that's not an easy task. We had to do a raw copy of the old drive onto a new one, resulting in a 55.9GB file. Then nate downloaded it, which took about 4 days since the connection kept failing, and I started to work on a program to scan the disk image for zip files and forum fragments. As you've seen, Nate got all the site content back up last weekend. We could have had the forum back at the same time but it would have only been with posts up to May 1. Nobody wanted that... so I got busy. I investigated the format of the database files that resulted from the restore of the may 1 backup, then searched for indications of those files in the disk image. As I expected, the files were in many fragments. The smallest fragment size was only 4k, and I spent all of last weekend and monday working on finding the next fragment and pasting them together to reform the file. I wish I could bill Marie for the time I put in at $20+ an hour. When we tried to import the files I assembled, the database gave a lot of errors, so I had to check them over again. I found some parts I'd missed, and there were still errors. Finally today, after I figured out the format of the files, I wrote my own program to scan them and easily found where the errors were. In both cases it was because I'd accidentally pasted the same fragment twice. At the same time I got the idea that we could easily (compared to what I'd been doing) re-integrate the old posts from last year which were accidentally pruned, and then saved on oldforum/. And now, here we are. Everything is restored except for a few poll topics which lost their polls, because they're in another file which is so small I don't have any hints to find it.
Hope everyone continues as if nothing had happened!
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