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Connection problems again! (GoDaddy Host)

Started by Thotos, December 29, 2017, 02:00:15 PM

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Sir Osis of Liver

Just finishing recovering forum with similar problem.  GoDaddy somehow managed to screwup the database server, it's fixed now, the database was not damaged.  If you can pm your GD username/password, will try to get to it tonight.  Have another trashed forum to work on, but should have time to take a look.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Thotos

Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on December 29, 2017, 09:24:52 PM
Just finishing recovering forum with similar problem.  GoDaddy somehow managed to screwup the database server, it's fixed now, the database was not damaged.  If you can pm your GD username/password, will try to get to it tonight.  Have another trashed forum to work on, but should have time to take a look.


Thanks for your offer of help and might well take you up on it but I finally managed to get GoDaddy to admit it's their problem.  ;)
Oh and I was wrong about the working forum only having 23 tables, I was looking at an old damaged database  ::) The working forum has 87 tables! I am an ignoramus but I am learning...  :o

I've just spent the last couple of hours with GoDaddy tech support in Phoenix Arizona! (but by calling a local STD number!).  I finally spoke to a tech support guy who admitted to me that they migrated the database server on the 19th of December and that's what's  killed my forum as the database has been corrupted. He also admitted to me that they've had lots of similar support calls from many others in the past week.  They are trying to locate a backup of my database from before the 19th to restore but so far they are not doing well. Their support guy, who has sent me an email with his details, has promised me that he'll stay on the case until they find a backup and restore it. Hopefully they'll find one.

At work we use Carbonite Backup (https://www.carbonite.com/). When something goes wrong, simply right-click on a file, select Carbonite and restore any of the backups going back 3 weeks. I'm surprised GoDaddy can't find and restore a backup from the 18th of December  ???

Sir Oris is it possible to recreate the database tables from the forum data?

Sir Osis of Liver

The forum content (settings, members, topics, posts, etc.) is in the database tables, if you lose the tables, the data is gone.  My host has R1Soft in cpanel, it backs up files and databases daily, saves them for 30 days.  I recently recovered a large forum that I had moved from GD to my host (Crocweb) using R1Soft, it worked fine.  I also run cronjobs that do daily db backups on my production forums and saves them for a month, just in case.  I believe some GD packages support cronjobs, but I'd get out if I were you.  Been working on GD forums for several years here, and they're worse now than they ever were.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Thotos

Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on December 29, 2017, 09:54:15 PM
.... but I'd get out if I were you.  Been working on GD forums for several years here, and they're worse now than they ever were.

The GD Tech Support guy admitted to me that a lot of their servers, especially on their shared hosting,  are very old (9-10 years old) so they are replacing them. Unfortunately they are getting the data migration wrong and messing things up. The guy said "I'm not sure if we are helping by upgrading the servers or making things worse". He even suggested that I either change to one of their other hosting plans or change hosts!!  GD do offer a daily cloud backup for $1.99/month so I'll go for it if they fix my forum and I decide to stay. I would take everyone's advice and move hosts but I don't see that being a simple straightforward thing to do. As I mentioned above, my GD hosting is up for renewal on the 20th of January so I have some research to do in the next  3 weeks or so....

Sir Osis of Liver

Depends on what else you have running in the account, moving a forum is pretty routine.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Thotos

Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on December 29, 2017, 10:23:01 PM
Depends on what else you have running in the account, moving a forum is pretty routine.


Not much. A simple website and a single SMF forum.
Will look into alternative hosts...
But first I need GoDaddy to find and restore a pre-19th December backup of my database.

Sir Osis of Liver

Have you done any backups with cpanel backup utility?  They would be in /_db_backups.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Quote from: Thotos on December 29, 2017, 09:35:59 PM
I've just spent the last couple of hours with GoDaddy tech support in Phoenix Arizona! (but by calling a local STD number!).  I finally spoke to a tech support guy who admitted to me that they migrated the database server on the 19th of December and that's what's  killed my forum as the database has been corrupted. He also admitted to me that they've had lots of similar support calls from many others in the past week.  They are trying to locate a backup of my database from before the 19th to restore but so far they are not doing well. Their support guy, who has sent me an email with his details, has promised me that he'll stay on the case until they find a backup and restore it. Hopefully they'll find one.

At work we use Carbonite Backup (https://www.carbonite.com/). When something goes wrong, simply right-click on a file, select Carbonite and restore any of the backups going back 3 weeks. I'm surprised GoDaddy can't find and restore a backup from the 18th of December  ???
That sounds like progress, but really - combine this new information, the amount of time you have suffered from this problem, and their attempt to charge you 150$ to fix it ( while now it seems they can't even do that ) ... I'd say get away from them as fast as you can.
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

Thotos

Quote from: Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen on December 30, 2017, 04:17:23 AM
That sounds like progress, but really - combine this new information, the amount of time you have suffered from this problem, and their attempt to charge you 150$ to fix it ( while now it seems they can't even do that ) ... I'd say get away from them as fast as you can.

Sounds like progress but no real progress yet. I can't believe that a hosting provider would migrate a server without taking a full backup first. Probably an old server died and they migrated whatever they could. Even that doesn't make sernse as they should have backups of all their servers :-(

Thotos

Not good!  >:( I've just received this:

"Hi Theo,

My team has looked all over to find any trace of the past database on the account.  They have been unsuccessful.  I didn't want to be the bearer of bad news but they don't have any information aside from what got moved over.

Thank You,
Jim Parzych
Sales and Support Consultant


>:(  I can't believe that a hosting service provider who offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee have not only managed to lose data but now claim not to have backups. There must be a backup somewhere even if it's several weeks or even months old.  >:(

It may only be an insignificant car club forum but it's been running for 10 years and there was a lot of useful information. I certainly won't be renewing my hosting plan with GoDaddy after this.

I have another (older) hosting plan with Netfirms. Anyone have experience with them? Anything good or bad to say about them?

Sir Osis of Liver

There's a reason why you're supposed to do regular backups.  GD has a db backup utility in cpanel that works reasonably well, but they don't do automatic backups.  My host runs R1Soft, which backs up all files and databases daily and saves them for 30 days.  I also run cronjob backups on my production forums.  It's your data, you have to take care of it yourself.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

You may want to ask the difficult questions, what were they planning to do when they offered to charge you money for fixing this? And how are they planning to refund you for lost data, and the long downtime caused by it. I would.

When my host did a similar move some years back, I got access to my old server and my new server for a month before the old went offline, just so that I can make sure nothing broke, and could take backups of all I needed to make sure... For free.   
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

Thotos

Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on December 30, 2017, 10:48:27 PM
There's a reason why you're supposed to do regular backups.  GD has a db backup utility in cpanel that works reasonably well, but they don't do automatic backups.  My host runs R1Soft, which backs up all files and databases daily and saves them for 30 days.  I also run cronjob backups on my production forums.  It's your data, you have to take care of it yourself.


I realise that now! But I still cannot believe that a hosting provider does not backup their servers, I simply cannot accept that. When a similar thing happened to another of my forums a couple of years ago, GD reloaded a backup of the database that was a few days old and all was well. I don't understand why this time they have no backups. They must have but probably can't be bothered to find a backup of what is for them "an unimportant database".
My hosting plan with GD is over 10 years old so I don't have cPanel access, I need to change my hosting plan for that. I can make database backups vis the phpMyAdmin panel. While I have backups of the website and SMF software, I naively assumed the database was safe as the host would make regular backups of their shared hosting database servers.

Sir Osis of Liver

Some hosts (not all) don't save system backups for more than a few days, but you've been royally screwed.  Any responsible host should do a full server backup before migrating to a new server.  GoDaddy has always been a crappy host, but they're much worse now than they've ever been.  I've worked on GD accounts for years, and it's hard to believe that after all this time they still don't get it.  If you were running a commercial site, you'd have grounds for a lawsuit.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Thotos

Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on December 31, 2017, 09:09:47 PM
Some hosts (not all) don't save system backups for more than a few days, but you've been royally screwed.  Any responsible host should do a full server backup before migrating to a new server.  GoDaddy has always been a crappy host, but they're much worse now than they've ever been.  I've worked on GD accounts for years, and it's hard to believe that after all this time they still don't get it.  If you were running a commercial site, you'd have grounds for a lawsuit.


Yes, I have been royally screwed by GD and I'm very annoyed as well as ashamed for not having made a useable backup of the database but I never imagined that a host wouldn't backup their servers. Data that came from me i.e the rest of the website is backed up several places. The GD data migration was on the 19th of December. I was made aware of the problem on the 22nd of December. It took me over a week to convince GD that the problem was caused by them, they kept saying "nothing wrong with our servers. It's your software producing too many requests to the database server". I suspect the migration on the 19th of December was due to their server dying so they migrated whatever they could recover....

Thotos

Is there anything that can be done with what's left of the database? The number of boards are there, the attachment files (a lot of them!) table is there and attachments are saved externally, permissions are there etc. Could I make any use of what's left to recreate the forum even though important stuff such as messages and users are lost?  :-\

Sir Osis of Liver

Not much left.  You might be able to recreate the basic structure by importing smf_boards and smf_categories to a new install, but easy enough to do it manually.  Not much you can do with attachments, the filenames are hashed.  If you restore the filenames, you could organize the pics into a gallery on a new forum.  I suppose you could go through the table one row at a time and rename the files from file_hash to filename, but you have over 2000 attachments, I wouldn't want to try that.  Might be possible to write a script to restore filenames. 

Do you have the original database credentials from before the move, maybe a copy of old Settings.php?  Anything is possible with GoDaddy, the database could still be running on the old server.

Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

shawnb61

Renaming the attachments via batch script is kinda easy using Excel if you have the attachments table.   I did it a while back trying to help someone else  trying to recover attachments.

More info here:
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=554131.msg3927825#msg3927825

Address the process rather than the outcome.  Then, the outcome becomes more likely.   - Fripp

Thotos

Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on December 31, 2017, 10:59:11 PM
Do you have the original database credentials from before the move, maybe a copy of old Settings.php?  Anything is possible with GoDaddy, the database could still be running on the old server.

With GD's dynamically allocated database servers, the database and server name remain the same and the same credentials are used even though the database may be moved to a different server. When I've had to make changes to Settings.php due to server changes, I commented out the old server name or IP and added the new ones:


########## Database Info ##########

#$db_server = 'mysql295.secureserver.net';

#$db_server = '10.6.173.12';

$db_server = 'gam073502302533.db.11678243.hostedresource.com';

$db_name = 'gam073502302533';

$db_user = 'gam073502302533';


I've tried connecting to the old servers just in case they still had an old copy of the database but no such luck.

I too thought of creating a gallery of the old attachment files/photos. Renaming the files shouldn't be too much of a problem as the original file name is part of the hashed name e.g. 6_forumgamma_jpga6893352cb45800da2c70f53f1431d26.

Recreating the look and feel of the forum even if it's blank might be better than starting from scratch...

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