# Eight and a half months. . . GONE

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eight-and-a-half-months-gone/419680>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [September 19, 2007, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eight-and-a-half-months-gone/419680 "2007-09-19T00:33:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![VernWinterbottom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/c67d28/32.png) [@VernWinterbottom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VernWinterbottom)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2007, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eight-and-a-half-months-gone/419680/1 "2007-09-19T00:33:11Z")

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Wow.

Two online forums that I frequent every day were down yesterday. Today both are back, but with everything since early January missing. :eek:

Even the members who signed up since January are gone.

Thousands of posts. . . millions of words. . . four or five original thoughts. . . gone.

Ain’t technology grand.

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**Author:** ![Risha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/5fc32e/32.png) [@Risha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Risha)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2007, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eight-and-a-half-months-gone/419680/2 "2007-09-19T02:26:28Z")

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BACKUPS!!! _thwacks unknown administrator over the head_

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**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2007, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eight-and-a-half-months-gone/419680/3 "2007-09-19T02:29:05Z")

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Let him be brought to the laboratory to be experimented upon.

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**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2007, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eight-and-a-half-months-gone/419680/4 "2007-09-19T18:54:11Z")

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Wow. That makes our very own Winter of Missed Content seem like a minor blip.

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**Author:** ![TroubleAgain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e480ec/32.png) [@TroubleAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroubleAgain)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2007, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eight-and-a-half-months-gone/419680/5 "2007-09-19T20:57:18Z")

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It ain’t ezBoard, is it? 'Cause a _ **LOT** _ of boards got wiped last time they were hacked.

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**Author:** ![VernWinterbottom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/c67d28/32.png) [@VernWinterbottom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VernWinterbottom)\
**Post date:** [September 19, 2007, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/eight-and-a-half-months-gone/419680/6 "2007-09-19T23:38:29Z")

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Don’t know who actually operates the server, but apparently host of at least two message boards had a “catastrophic hardware failure” and corruption of backup files. Everything after January 6, 2007, has been lost.

All members who joined since January 6 are gone. (And all people banned since January 6 are back!)

Both sites deal with magic performance. (If it were real magic, of course, they could just make all this stuff reappear. . .) The larger of the two boards has (or had) over 30,000 members worldwide with an average of 75 to 100 members on the board at any given time. The smaller board has just a few hundred members.