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PCGamingWiki:2022 Data Loss

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games

What happened?

On the 5th of November PCGamingWiki's main database experienced a catastrophic corruption event that incurred massive data loss, forcing us to restore to an earlier backup from October 8th. We are very sorry about the loss of recent edits, and are working towards preventing this from ever happening again in the future.


What has been done?

Luckily one of our senior editors had a partial backup of the site from October 30th which we have restored to the site. The backup contains the latest revision (text only) of all game pages only as they appeared on October 30th, and has been restored as the edit history of all pages. However this was not a process that merged any edits, and instead one of two scenarios have occurred for all pages:

  • If the page was edited after the site was brought online from the October 8th backup, but before the October 30th partial backup was restored, then the October 30th edit will be restored as part of the edit history, but otherwise not included in the current latest revision of the page as that revision was made based on the October 8th backup.
  • If the page was not edited after the site was brought online from the October 8th backup and before the October 30th partial backup was restored, then the latest revision as it appeared on October 30th will be the current latest revision as well.

Most of the backend related changes (templates etc) have also been implemented, and all rows that were supported and shown on the game articles should now appear properly again.


What is currently being done?

At this point most of the main work has been done and it is mostly leftover tasks that needs to be performed:

  • Any game page with unmerged edits (an edit was made to the site before the October 30th backup could be restored to it) needs to be manually merged by editors.
  • The restored template changes etc still have not been implemented in the Cargo tables (meaning are not queryable), though this is expected to be finished by late November.
  • The backup configuration etc is being looked over to ensure this sort of data loss will not occur going forward.
  • Any other pages, images, etc that were lost needs to be manually recreated by editors or users as they discover them.


What should I do?

If you are a visitor just looking for information, feel free to use the site as usual as the main work has been completed.

If you are an editor wanting to edit a page, you can do so now, though please check if the October 30th backup has been merged into the latest revision of the page:

  • If an edit was made after October 30th but before November 7th, please perform a comparison with the "imported>" revision and see if any changes were lost. If some changes were lost, we would appreciate it if you could assist in restoring them by merging the restored revision with the latest current revision.


What about images, glossary pages, other pages, or template related changes?

As the partial backup from October 30th only included the text game pages from the main namespace, any other change made after October 8th to other pages (e.g. to audio/video templates, glossary pages, talk pages etc) will sadly need to be recreated manually as there is no newer backup of those.

All images uploaded between October 8th and November 5th are permanently lost and needs to be re-uploaded as well. For a list of missing images, check the Category:Pages with broken file links page.


Where is this being discussed?

All discussions pertaining to the data loss is held on our Discord, in the #wiki-support channel.


TLDR?

  • On the 5th of November the server crashed, leading to a catastrophic corruption event that resulted in all current and recent backup data being unusable and unrecoverable.
  • The most recent known good working backup that was restored was from the 8th of October 2022.
  • Thanks to a partial backup made senior editor, all game articles have been restored to how they appeared on the 30th of October.
    • Anything added between October 30th and November 5th to game pages have been lost and will need to be manually re-added.
    • Any files uploaded between October 8th and November 5th were not included in the backup and thus have been lost, and are required to be reuploaded.
  • Everything elsewhere on the wiki, such as User pages, Talk (Discussion) pages, or Lists, that had been added between October 8th and November 5th has been lost, and will need to be manually re-added.