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ZorbaTHut  2mo ago (text post)   3666 thread views

Site Rollback to February 3rd

Very sorry about this one, guys.

For reasons that I'm currently unsure of, the database decided to eat itself. I'm giving it something like 40/40/20 "hacker", "postgres bug", or "host glitch".

The site currently has two different backup methods. The manual backup triggers whenever I do a site update; the last site update was on 1/31. The automatic backup is supposed to be daily, and I check it once in a while to make sure it's working. It's been working literally ever since before the main Motte site was launched . . . and it broke on 2/4. Good timing, thanks, system.

In theory, the quality-contribution system captured all reported quality contributions during this time. I'll try to retrieve those. Any opinions on whether I should just go ahead and repost them, or whether I should send them to the person so they can repost them?

I do have a dump of a bunch of text snippets that are all that was left of the database. If you remember some phrases you used I might be able to retrieve parts of lost posts. That said, someone's tried this with a few posts and got 0/2, so absolutely no promises here. Feel free to ask though! If you want to take data recovery more seriously, make a copy of your browser cache, which can then be pored over to find people's posts. I'm not totally sure how important this is, but I bet at least a few people will be sad to lose effortposts they made.

I've fixed the backup issue and set up better monitoring so it will yell at me if it fails again. I've also temporarily increased backup frequency to hourly, just in case there's some serious stability issue right now that I'm not aware of. The good news is that this shouldn't happen again, at least with as much lost data. But that doesn't really fix this one.

Apologies again.

This too shall pass.

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I've got maybe five-dozen posts from the last couple days still open in my 100+ chrome tabs, including @coffee_enjoyer's "He Gets Us doesn't get it" post and some of the replies.

How does one make a copy of the browser cache? I'd be happy to give it a try if someone's got a tutorial.

Heck. I appreciated that whole sub thread.

indeed. I got your post in the raw dump, btw.

Ahh I was looking forward to replying to your response today! At least I think it was your reply, not 100% sure. I just copy/pasted the post to the CW, if you still have yours you should paste it.

How does one make a copy of the browser cache

Literally take the browser cache folder that gattsuru posted below and make a copy of it to somewhere else

done. any idea how to try to extract post data from it?

If you're on Windows, ChromeCacheView is the easiest way. It will default to the current cache, but clicking the stop button in the bottom left, and then click File-> Select Cache Folder will allow you to select any other folder, and it'll look in that folder and descending folders for cache data.

There's (too many) filter options, but the easiest combo is to enable View -> Use Quick Filter, then type themotte.org into the Quick Filter textbox that shows up. Select the ContentType column header to sort by type, and look for the text/html files. Shift-select the ones you want to export, and then use the right-click Copy Selected Cache Files to... copy them into a directory you can find and read through. They'll then be accessible like normal files.

tried this, and got lots of images and random chunks of html code, but no readable text. a lot of the entries give a 404, or say the content was removed.

If you know how to use a terminal, grep for anything with the string 'motte' in it and then zip those files up and upload them to the dev discord i think is the easiest. It's in a bit of a weird format

specifically 'rg -a -uuu -l motte'

There's a few people on the dev discord talking about it, and it appears to be Actually Kind Of Difficult. Honestly, copy-pasting those posts out would be the easiest solution.

I am desperately in need of sleep and will be tackling the AAQC recovery tomorrow.

Did you see that the wayback machine has a lot of it?

Yeah, there's someone on the dev Discord who did a big dump. I'm currently pinging the mods to make sure there's no strong reason not to post this, and otherwise I'll probably be posting a big chunky JSON archive of everything so people can repost if they want.

(edit: posted)

That would be awesome, because I actually really loved your reply to that post. It was top notch and I would be sad to see it go.

sadly, the page with my reply on it was the one I refreshed.

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