5 replies to this topic

[SJ-David]

Unfortunately there seems to be a hardware problem with our server that hosts our snowjapan.tv server - and so the site is currently unavailable.

We are really not sure of all the details at this moment and it is out of our direct control at this stage but we are doing what we can to get this sorted as quickly as possible.

We'll update this when more is know.

The main site and forums are completely unaffected by this.

Thanks

[SJ-David]

Looks like it is going to perhaps take a day or two. We will get things back to normal as soon as we possibly can. Sorry for the disruption.

[SJ-David]

The good news this morning is that we now have the site back up online, http://www.snowjapan.tv

You might notice however that some more recent files are not up there and we are now in the process of getting that sorted.

I will update this again when we have been able to progress on that.

Thanks.

[SJ-David]

Good news this evening as the site is pretty much back to normal with full functionality, albeit unfortunately with recent clips missing.

There is some more - hopefully final - testing to do tomorrow and then I hope that we will be able to explain the situation more fully.

Thanks for your patience.

[SJ-Andrew]

We are still testing to make sure everything is ok, but I would like to explain what happened here.

Without getting into too much detail, the server hardware suddenly broke beyond repair.

The situation should have been fairly simple to recover because we had been paying for full daily server backups - in fact full backups of the most recent 6 days - to be kept in a secure remote location, as well as a full weekly backup sent to us for our records. That means that at any one time we have 7 full backups of the server. One is a snapshot of the server as it was within 24 hours, and the oldest being from 6 days previous.

If we are to believe the story we have been provided, not only had the server expired, but all of the backups were also corrupted and unusable - including the ones that we had received weekly and have on hand here.

This means that we effectively had no usable site backups.

This all from what seemed to be a reputable, acredited hosting company.

Luckily, we did have a full manual backup from March - and that is what we now have on our new server.

When you pay for comprehensive backups, and to the extent that we were believing we had, you expect to have the piece of mind that in cases of hardware failure, your operation can be easily covered and soon back online. Apart from that, it is very difficult for us to believe that both the server and backups were unrecoverable.

Once the initial shock and anger moved on, this has been a very frustrating and annoying experience. There are some other people in a similar situation and there is some talk of legal action, but of course for us the most important thing is our websites. We are still following up on this to try and recover anything more recent.

-------

So, as I said the site is back to how it was in March. There weren't too many clips added since then, so it could have been much worse.

We do have records of who uploaded clips and so over the next few days we plan to contact those people by email to let them know about this situation.

If you are reading this and did upload a clip since March, all we can do is apologise about this situation and ask that you please re-upload. Or alternatively send us the clip and we will do it all for you. You may need to re-register.

-------

There are lessons to be learnt here and we have certainly learnt one or two. You can be sure that we will be doing everything we can to make sure that something like this does not happen again!

Apologies for this situation once again.

[SJ-David]

Just to update on this situation - the .tv site is now back to normal and should be working as it should be. If you do visit the site and encounter any problems please do let us know at editor@snowjapan.com

Thank you.