Our Database Server crashed on 8/6. Our Hosting Company had to recover the database back to 7/30. For some of you, this will cause one of the following problems:
1. If you put up a new Profile between 7/30 when the backup was taken and 8/6 when the backup was restored, your profile will be missing and you’ll have to start again, from scratch.
2. If you made changes to an existing Profile between 7/30 and 8/6 the changes have been lost and you’ll have to redo them. This includes changes to anything in your profile including, name, location, status, etc.
3. This is a weird one and it will not affect that many people, but if you’re one of the people that’s affected it will be confusing… to say the least. Over the next 6 to 7 days or so, people who put up new profiles may wind up with other people’s pictures as part of their profile. If this happens you can delete the other persons’ pictures if they are Secondary Pictures or Gallery Pictures. If your Main Profile Picture winds up as someone else’s you have to upload your own picture over it and when we approve it the wrong one will be replaced by the new, correct one.
There’s a pretty long explanation for what causes number 3, above. For those of you who want the long explanation, I’ve included it below:
When we create a new profile it’s given an ID in the database. The oldest profile in our database is ID 1 and the newest profile in the database is up to about ID 150100 or so.
When a person uploads pictures, they are named based on the person’s profile ID followed by an underscore, followed by the picture number. So, in my example, ID 2, there are a bunch of pictures on the filesystem that begin with 2… 2_0.jpg, 2_1.jpg, 2_2.jpg… 2_9.jpg, etc. and there are also gallery pics that begin with my ID followed by an underscore, followed by the gallery number, followed by another undersore, followed by the image number, resulting in something like 2_100_1.jpg, 2_100_2.jpg… 2_100_20.jpg, etc., so, when we display a profile, we know which images belong to it based on the name of the images as the image name begins with the ID of the profile.
Here’s where the problem comes in…
When our Hosting Company restored our database back to 7/30 they neglected to clean out any images that were uploaded after 7/30 so there are a bunch of images out there on the filesystem that begin with IDs that didn’t yet exist on 7/30.
Now, when a new profile is created, it’s going to get the next highest ID number based on what’s in the database. If there are images on the filesystem whose name begins with that ID number (remember, our Hosting Company neglected to delete the images uploaded after 7/30) then they will immediately wind up associated with the new profile.
Subscriptions are not affected by this, just Profiles, however, Ratings will be reset and start fresh on 8/7 because of the database restore.
Again, we’re really sorry for this. We’ve taken steps with our Hosting Company so that they never restore a database backup that’s over a day old if there’s a corruption in the future.