The Wikitastrophy: Difference between revisions
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===Recovery Operations=== | ===Recovery Operations=== | ||
Salvaging of the wiki began right away as Brady started going through his Google cache to find saved websites. The cached data was stored into a dropbox folder. Brodie quickly joined in, digging through his cache. Unfortunately the only page he found was [[Brickboy]]'s. Others later joined the recovery effort, trying to find what pages survived on other computers, and what was actually lost to history. Over half the wiki was gone, including build-lists, historical events, and some profiles. One of the highest profile losses was the [[California Connection]] page. | Salvaging of the wiki began right away as Brady started going through his Google cache to find saved websites. The cached data was stored into a dropbox folder. Brodie quickly joined in, digging through his cache. Unfortunately the only page he found was [[Brickboy]]'s. Others later joined the recovery effort, trying to find what pages survived on other computers, and what was actually lost to history. Over half the wiki was gone, including build-lists, historical events, and some profiles. One of the highest profile losses was the [[California Connection]] page. TERMS had suffered and equally devastating loss, with most of its terminology entries lost. The only saving grace was that some terms prior to their port onto AWS had survived. This gave Brady and Chance the opportunity to rebuild the database later on. | ||
With the remains of the old wiki, the data was migrated over to Jaredkat's ioTheory servers and the wiki was slowly rebuilt into what it is today. Recovery has been slow as the huge loss dealt a major moral hit to the PPX community. However, with time, pages are slowly returning to the wiki. | With the remains of the old wiki, the data was migrated over to Jaredkat's ioTheory servers and the wiki was slowly rebuilt into what it is today. Recovery has been slow as the huge loss dealt a major moral hit to the PPX community. However, with time, pages are slowly returning to the wiki. | ||
Revision as of 04:30, 8 August 2019
First interaction by Brady about the wiki deletion | |
| Date of Event | January 5th, 2019 |
|---|---|
| Cause | Operator error due to poor user interface |
The Wikitastrophy was a catastrophic deletion event where the entirety of the Pixelated Pickaxe wiki was erased from the AWS servers.
Timeline of Events
Prior to the deletion event, the Pixelated Pickaxe wiki was steadily growing and accumulating more information by the week. Various efforts by a collection of users and community members had turned the PPX wiki project into a serious endeavor.
The events that led up to the wikitastrophy began with a routine fix to two Discord Bots: TERMS and Pathetic Bot. On the evening of January 5th, both TERMS and Pathetic Bot were disabled due to reasons related to issues with Brady Coles's AWS server. Earlier in the day, Chance reported to Brady TERMS' outage. This prompted Brady to restart the bots which included rebooting the wiki.
At the time, both the Bots and the Wiki inhabited the same AWS servers. Community member JaredKat had offered on January 1st to migrate the all of PPX's data to his servers, opening up new opportunities for the wiki, server, and community at large. Brady was just beginning the process of transition all the assets to the new ioTheory servers.
With the Bots unresponsive, Brady tried shutting down the server. This wasn't the first time this has happened. Prior to the deletion event, both Bots have been know to fail at random times. In most instances, this shut down would have remedied the situation. This time however, the system refused to shut down. In attempt to resolve this issue, Brady issued a 'terminate' command to the server, thinking it was a force shut down command. However, under AWS, the terminate command is a purging action; wiping the server of everything. This oversight in AWS' user interface is well known and has been documented in forums numerous times. Lack of proper documentation as well meant new users, like Brady, could be susceptible to making such a catastrophic error. With the terminate command issued, the entirety of the PPX wiki was wiped out of existence.
Aftermath
The response was almost immediate. Moments after wiping the server, Brady notified the PPX Discord. Cameron was first to respond and after some initial discussion commented that Brady had "really [done] it this time". Brady admitted to the error saying it was "probably [his] worst messup ever in the history of me". Brodie commented on the loss by saying "that [it] hurts [his] heart".
Recovery Operations
Salvaging of the wiki began right away as Brady started going through his Google cache to find saved websites. The cached data was stored into a dropbox folder. Brodie quickly joined in, digging through his cache. Unfortunately the only page he found was Brickboy's. Others later joined the recovery effort, trying to find what pages survived on other computers, and what was actually lost to history. Over half the wiki was gone, including build-lists, historical events, and some profiles. One of the highest profile losses was the California Connection page. TERMS had suffered and equally devastating loss, with most of its terminology entries lost. The only saving grace was that some terms prior to their port onto AWS had survived. This gave Brady and Chance the opportunity to rebuild the database later on. With the remains of the old wiki, the data was migrated over to Jaredkat's ioTheory servers and the wiki was slowly rebuilt into what it is today. Recovery has been slow as the huge loss dealt a major moral hit to the PPX community. However, with time, pages are slowly returning to the wiki.