Post a comment
Tweet this
Share on Facebook
Print this article
Last week, hackers destroyed Avsim, a community of flight simulator enthusiasts since 1996. Thirteen years of mods, skins, and terrains were deleted when both the website server and their backup server were compromised. They’ve since set up a temporary site and started salvaging what they can from the Wayback Machine and elsewhere, but much work is likely forever lost.
When I read this story, I felt a pit in my stomach. In 2003, Icrontic was brought to its knees in similar fashion. Though our community has existed since August 2000, our archives only stretch back to May of 2003. In the aftermath of our server being compromised, those who then ran the site discovered to their horror that the “backups” were in fact storing the wrong database.
Tens of thousands of forum posts and our collective community history was obliterated with the database and entire file structure. Our custom CMS was toast – no one even knew how to recreate the table structure, let alone get it running again. The resulting saga stretched on for years until our community was made whole again under the Icrontic name in 2007.
It’s constantly wounding to see “15 posts” under the name of an old member like Darksword, who was a super-moderator with thousands of posts before the 2003 crash. The start of our Folding@Home team, the record of our first-in-the-world 3DMark team, all of our favorite old-school articles – gone forever. All we have now from that era are memories of what was.
As you can imagine, Brian and I pay special attention to our backup strategy.
Every night, our database is backed up to a second server (much like Avsim was). However, that’s just the start. We manually download a copy of the database frequently. We manually back up the entire file structure (images, code, downloads, videos, etc) every few months. We periodically burn a copy of the database to DVD and lock it in a fire safe.
To irreparably damage Icrontic, you would need to compromise both of our servers, steal or destroy 2 computers at ICHQ, and break open my safe. And even if you did all that, we’ve already proven that our community is more than data.
Data loss is a hard lesson. We were lucky enough to survive our trial by fire and are stronger for it. We wish the best to the Avsim community and hope they come back kicking.
RSS Feeds