A crashed website - 2017!

Last Friday, just before I left for Exeter, I received an email from the company that hosts the website. They had suspended the account, which meant the the website was off-line! They said in their email that I had failed to abide by their T&Cs. Apparently, they felt I was providing a “data warehouse”. They said the number of photos was excessive and should be provided in a different form.

The little problemette with suspending the account was, not only that the website was “turned off” but that I lost access to my Killerton email address (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and this was the address I was relying on for people to message me over the weekend.

I hastily replied to the email and explained they were personal photos and organised using a software application they had provided, etc, and said I’d investigate further – but that I was just literally just leaving for the weekend.

On the drive down to Exeter when we stopped I was able to check my normal email occasionally.

After a couple of exchanges with the technical support guys I received a note from them to say that they had reinstated the account. Quite a relief.

On my return this week I went about sorting through the website. I removed a couple of galleries of personal photos and started to look at how to provide the Killerton photos more effectively.

On Tuesday I carried out an update to one of the templates on the website.

This resulted in the whole website being corrupted.

After some mild cursing I went about recovering the website from a backup taken on Thursday last week – only to find that that backup was corrupted. That’s ok, I took a backup last Wednesday – that one was incomplete!

*** note to self – backup more often – check the size of the backups ***

The most recent backup prior to that was taken the 6th June - made before a whole raft of new pages had been added and photos uploaded.

The recovery was successful in as much as the website was running again – well sort of. I needed to change several things. This meant relearning how I’d put it together in the first place bearing in mind that the website software has gone through two major upgrades in the last couple of years.

Suffice to say, the website is working now (I think) and I think I have most things back in place, but do let me know if you gave me something and it is not there.

I have restored the Reunions photo albums, including photos from this year’s cricket weekend and photos from the 69ers weekend in Birmingham. I am looking into other solutions to make the rest of the photos available.

Keep an eye on the website these will appear in due course.