ZetaBoards Announcement

 

As you're probably aware, the server your board is hosted on recently had a hardware problem that led to your board losing data. We wanted to take this chance to explain what happened, and what we plan on doing about it in the future.

First we'd like to explain how this happened. We've been providing message boards to users like you for almost 6 years. Your community is something we take seriously. Over these years we've developed a system that uses two types of backups to protect your board's data.

All of ZetaBoard's servers use RAID hard drive arrays. These RAID arrays create multiple copies of your board's data and are the first level of data backup we use to protect your board. In addition to the real time copies of your board that are created with the RAID array, we also take full offsite backups to further protect your board.

The first event was the failure of one of hard drives in server 6. This had no impact on your board as the RAID array is designed to protect against exactly this type of failure.
The second event was unfortunately something we couldn't predict or prevent. The data center where the servers are located attempted to replace the hard drive that had failed. While they were doing this, they incorrectly erased the RAID backup data that was on the remaining hard drives.
Finally, our offsite backups in this case didn't occur properly because the number of boards that converted to ZetaBoards in round 1 on Server 6 were not enough to trigger the backup system for ZetaBoards on Server 6. We're currently checking on this and will fix the backup system for ZetaBoards so that these backups occur properly in the future.

We understand that any data lost from your community can be difficult. While we're investigating ways to recover more recent data from the erased hard drives we wanted to offer your community something to help it rebuild. We haven't announced the full details of this service yet, but we're giving you a sneak peak at our new premium message board package. While ZetaBoards will always be free, we're planning a new paid service based on ZetaBoards that will include many new and powerful features. Not only will your board be eligible to be one of the first to use the new service, but we're also going to give you a full year free on the new service. So send out an email to all your members letting them know that your board is back up and running and that soon you'll be part of this new premium service, We'll post more info about the service details as soon as it's ready to go.

If you have any questions, please visit us on the support forum at http://s2.zetaboards.com/support/ or send a support ticket from the Admin CP.