Forum restored - free to post...

[John C]

Looks great, again, Daiv! Thank you for all your hard work. It's disappointing to see what happened, but I am happy to see how much was restored!

[SnowFella]

Thinking about it, seeing that the whole image database was deleted from the server hosting it couldn't there be a way to recover them from the physical drive in question? I've done similar things several times on harddrives of my own always with a good result. I know that would depend alot on where and by whom the forum is hosted aswell as alot of goodwill from the webmaster in question as it would take time to isolate the drive in question aswell as searching it using a recovery program.
The longer it takes between the act of whiping the folder to the beginning of the recovery, provided that the drive is in use and has new data written to it, highly compromises the chance of recovering data though!

[amanzed]

@SnowFella , @Hob : "I've got in excess of 700 images in mine so I've only got a few more weeks to either cough up the dough or have 200+ images deleted. "

Check out DropBox... they are enhancing their photo support and for beta users, they were recently offering fairly generous (3-5 gigabytes) of free cloud storage for beta testers of their new version, for those inclined. I'm not sure if it's still available; just an (economical) thought!

[Arjen]

daiv, great to see the forum back! you already normally have quite the workload with it and now this.. thanks for all the energy and effort you put into cactiguide! may the ride be smooth from now on

[hob]

Why did you have to save them from Photobucket? Was there a problem with their service or policies?

its strange because some are missing and others are not................. i thought it was more than 18 months ago when i did that

the images on my pc are dated "27 February 2008" that would be when i downloaded them all to save them from photobucket.

Johns last postings were in December 2007 where he said he was leaving because he was in poor health.
the worry at the time was if anything happened to him and his photobucket account became inactive they might close the account. we had recently added the upload image feature to the forum at that time so it made sense to transfer the images to our server for safe keeping or so we thought at the time.

Fortunately i also backed them up on my own hard drive, so they now can be restored when i have the time.

Daiv are we sure all the images that we still have are stored in the correct directory??

which looks like it might be for me

Code: Select all

/forum/userpix/527

as some missing images have that address like this one

Code: Select all

http://www.cactiguide.com/forum/userpix/527_IMG_0143_1.jpg

[Andy_CT]

I tried to fix a missing image from a past photo contest but noticed those topics are locked.

[daiv]

Hob,
I forgot that I had to manually transfer images from the old forum to the new one. Working on that now.

[daiv]

Thinking about it, seeing that the whole image database was deleted from the server hosting it couldn't there be a way to recover them from the physical drive in question? I've done similar things several times on harddrives of my own always with a good result. I know that would depend alot on where and by whom the forum is hosted aswell as alot of goodwill from the webmaster in question as it would take time to isolate the drive in question aswell as searching it using a recovery program.
The longer it takes between the act of whiping the folder to the beginning of the recovery, provided that the drive is in use and has new data written to it, highly compromises the chance of recovering data though!

Yes, but unfortunately this isn't practical because of other websites hosted on the same disc that would be brought down for a while in the process. Tony is considering a larger/more powerful server move right now, but that needs to be scheduled and things so the data may be lost by that time. I've already mentioned to him, that I'd love to try anyway.

Daiv

[mughal113]

Thanks for your tremendous efforts Daiv.

[daiv]

OK, images are moved to the proper place. Now everything should be there from November 2010 backwards. December 2010 forward images are all missing.

The one positive about that is that it is easier to replace the newer images than the older ones. (desperate optimism)

[peter]

Looking good so far!
The header of prosilver looks odd though
Unfortunately, the chance to recover the missing images is low, I think

[daiv]

Yes, I haven't fixed the header on the other styles yet. I figured I would do the left profile thing at the same time with that.

I agree - image recovery is looking grim.

[hob]

OK, images are moved to the proper place. Now everything should be there from November 2010 backwards. December 2010 forward images are all missing.

that looks much better should save me a lot of work in cactus of the month too

[majcka]

Thank God I'm pretty new here so I didn't put very much pics on the web yet and were able to do that again. I think now all my pics are back on.

[Tiggy]

I think it's time that you and Hob have a well deserved break, put your feet up and an even more well deserved drink. Many thanks for getting everything back together, I was getting quite desperate, didn't realize how much time I passed on here until it was gone, tried other sites but it just wasn't the same. This one seems more informal with a good almost family type atmosphere about it THANKS AGAIN!!!