ShareAdSpace Loses Database

This message was recently posted by Rod Baker, the owner of ShareAdSpace, at several forums:

It comes with heavy heart to make this announcement but after 5 days of battling my hosting account (ev1servers.net), I have to sadly say that the backup drive lost all data.
Julie and I tried in vain for the service technicians to setup the server properly again after the outage but what we felt was an adequate backup system, prove to be our achille’s heal.

The server had 2 large hard drives. One drive operated the sites. The other drive served only one purpose: accepting the backup files from the cron job that ran twice per day. We had to do this setup instead of the original “email me the db backup file” because the backup size had grown too large for the email server to send it.

Besides, the direct hard drive to hard drive data transfer was ultra fast and require little processor power and zero bandwidth for the transfer.

Now, how did the backup drive lose IT’S data?

Here is the final comment from the service technician:

7/24/2006 10:33:09 PM
DataCenter
Dear Rodney Baker,

After further investigation, we have found that the original raid array may have been mishandled by technicians and reformatted. We have two drives from the original set but they do not seem to have data on them. We apologize deeply for the error and would like to know what what we can do to compensate for this mistake.

Rodney M.
EV1servers
Webhosting Support Services

What that means is, after they removed the bad drive (the one that ran the site) and replaced it with a brand new drive, the service tech reformatted BOTH drives after install. Why? I have no idea. Suffice it to say, all data, member info, earnings, forum posts, approved sites list...EVERYTHING…was wiped clean without my consent.

So, now, the question is, how do I/we move forward from here? (If I should even move forward at all in this industry). I have always prided myself on not being another statistic in this industry but here I am, explaining just that to all of you.

After long discussions with a few trusted friends, some things CAN’T happen:

1. Take everyone’s word for it as to what was owed. Although SAS had about 6,200 members at the time of the crash, I fear we will have 15,000 people claiming they were owed $50 or $100 each.

2. Reconstruct the site with what little info we have from each person that sends in their info. Again, although this would benefit THAT member, what about the thousands of others that never bothered to take a screen shot or keep close tabs on their referrals, etc.

Some options I am debating on is IF I restart SAS, offering double earnings for a certain period of time, elite memberships for everyone for 3 months or … some other form of payback yet to be determined.

I do know one thing though, if SAS comes back, since it will be an entirely new membership, some major changes will take place before the relaunch. These are things I have been debating on for quite some time because the PTP industry is just getting too saturated and beat down and I am having a hard time living with the fact that I am perpetuating some of the virus/Trojan problems that are occurring. Therefore, SAS would be minimize back to a traffic exchange (no ptp pages) but improve the traffic exchange and present some entertainment (games) within the surfer,

Of course, the main issue of this post is to inform everyone of the bad news: the data loss. If I/we rise out of this disaster, we can then think of the future.

I am deeply sorry for this mess and am here to take the lumps from all posters (I should have known better, etc). I felt it was important that I came here personally to deliver this news and I must ask everyone to NOT fault any of my assistants with this mess. They knew no more about any of this than you did.

With deep regrets,
Rod