On Thursday, July 1st, 2010 our site's hosting provider suffered a hardware issue which resulted in a complete loss of our site's data.

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Their support team originally told me it was just one bad drive, the other "mirror" drives was still okay, and the site was to be brought back within an hour with no data loss.

It was then discovered the entire system was corrupted as it was in the process of running a backup. I lost everything on my server. To completely compound the issue, I had just recently moved my sites to this new hosting provider and did not set up a secondary backup solution. I had been foolishly relying on the hosting provider's daily backups.

I spent many hours on the phone with the current provider, as well as the old hosting provider, trying to locate a fairly recent copy of the website's files and the database which runs it. Nobody could help me and I then had to turn to looking at every personal CD, DVD, hard drive and flash drive I own for a copy of the site.

About ready to throw in the towel after coming up empty, I finally found THIS version of the site on an old flash drive and worked on getting it functional again. This backup copy of the site I found is from 12/31/2007, so Happy New Year.

Unfortunately, I removed all of the message board posts, movies, images...anything that would take up space and cause the download of this backup copy (which I had made to do some testing/new development on) to take forever to download from the website server to my laptop. Downloading a few hundred MB was more attractive at the time than downloading the full 3GB the site USED to take up. Sadly, as explained below, much of the site content is gone forever.

[END GEEK SPEAK]

What you need to know:

1. All the Message Board posts are gone, forever.


2. All the Private Messages are gone, forever.


3. All the image galleries, movie galleries, story photos are gone, forever.


4. If you signed up for a user account on or after 1/1/2008, you will need to sign up for your account again.


5. If you don't remember what your password was back on 1/1/2008, you will need to request your password.


6. Everybody's Avatar/Personal Icon Images are gone and you will need to manually add them again. All post counts were reset to zero.


7. There are probably going to be a decent number of bugs on the site. If you find them, please us the Website Error Reporting option via the Contact Us page, or simply post a message in the Website Feedback/Questions/Bugs forum.

Ted and I are just sick to our stomachs over the lost of the "history" every member of this site has created in regards to Ohio University Athletics over the past 7 years. While it would be too large of a task to try to find all the message board posts, I am going to attempt to restore many of the news stories from the past 3 years from sites like Google Cache and other internet archive sites. If anybody would like to help with that task, let me know.

On the positive side, this couldn't have happened in a better month, and hopefully we can have a positive fresh start!

Go Bobcats!