Status of the server (URGENT news)

I'm sorry but this time I don't exactly have good news to bring you all. Well, actually, technically I have both bad and good news. The bad news are that the city has been lost. The good news are that it has been found again.

Turns out our hosting company doesn't save data for inactive services and since it's apparently been 22 days since the server went down they have irretrievably deleted everything. Fortunately Bren had saved a backup of the server... and here's what sucks; the backup is from january 3rd. So while we'll still have the map, we've lost the last 8 months of work.

I know, that sounds terrible, but I looked through old posts and we really haven't progressed that much during 2013 other than with the digging. A post from january 1st stated that half the lava pool in the forge had been filled, so if what we lost mainly has been some lava filling and digging in the farm caves then I'd say that's pretty lucky for a full 8 months. I would assume there's quite a lot of digging lost though :/


For now we need to rent a new server and get the backup uploaded and then figure out where to go from here.

This is why you need to have an offsite backup script enabled. Sigh. I dug a LOT in the farm caves in the last 8 months.

Can we at least get the backup map uploaded to minecraftworldmap.com or something in the meantime?

There was a lot of digging done in that time, but at least we have everything else. What we're going to do about this setback, I do not know.

I'll reply properly once I get home... but at least we still have something to work with, and haven't lost everything

spectrumwars wrote:This is why you need to have an offsite backup script enabled.  Sigh.  I dug a LOT in the farm caves in the last 8 months.  

Can we at least get the backup map uploaded to minecraftworldmap.com or something in the meantime?  

I've no idea what an offsite backup script is, but we're for sure going to save backups in the future and not let the server go down again.

What's minecraftworldmap.com and what's the purpose of putting a backup there?

sret wrote:
I've no idea what an offsite backup script is, but we're for sure going to save backups in the future and not let the server go down again.

The other server I play on has a program running that automatically saves the entire map to disk every 15 minutes.  A disk in another computer at a different server farm.  So if a meteor wipes out the server farm where our machine is, we only lose 15 minutes of work, tops.  A program on THAT computer deletes old copies eventually so that disk doesn't get choked by thousands of copies of the same 1gb map file, but we keep a fairly complete set of old copies.  

No, I don't know exactly how to set something like this up, but I can put you in touch with our admin, who does.  

sret wrote:
What's minecraftworldmap.com and what's the purpose of putting a backup there?

It's a website for storing, preserving, and displaying the worlds people create in minecraft.  Each map gets a scrollable/zoomable isometric-view 3d display map using some of the same tech Google Earth/Google Maps uses, showing the overworld in 3 different views:  Daytime, Night-time (so lit-up areas on the surface show up well, showing the difference between settled and explored-but-empty sections of the map), and cave-view (which is pretty good for showing off artificial underground structures like ours, but the way complex twisty natural caves overlap each other strictly limits its utility for finding dungeons or ores).  

Here's one of my old single-player worlds that I uploaded quite a while back.

http://www.minecraftworldmap.com/worlds/vrTOW

People can download maps from the site and then play them as single-player games or even host them as multiplayer servers.  It's a great way to show off an impressive build like ours and let others download it and tour it themselves.  

If you don't want to upload it there, perhaps we could offer to temporarily host it on our server?  We've got one of those insanely high-end hosting services that normally charges $150 a month that we wheedled a half price discount out of, and running our actual server only uses up like 1/6 of the processing/storage power of our dedicated server box.  This is because the minecraft program is single-threaded and literally incapable of using the other 5/6 of the CPU power of a multi-core chip.  We're thinking of renting out the un-used 5/6 of the CPU power to other minecraft servers, in fact a couple of our players host their own private creative test-world there as a second server to play on.  Trainman, myself, and a couple of other former Dwarf City players already play on our server, we'd be happy to offer tours to the other player while we're temporarily hosted with GolemLand.

well shoot man, I'm pretty sure it wasn't down for that long. we should see if we can squeeze out some free server payments for that one. But depending on how much has been un-dug in the caves we might be able to make it less impactful by reducing the size of the dig. as a suggestion. but all we can really do is haul ass until things are looking good again.

I'm going to be put back into that pitiless place of prison again soon, the one where they make us "learn" for our own "good", some know this ghastly place as "school", and in a couple of weeks I won't have as much time on my hands. So there's even less chance of me coming to do stuff on the server :l

Bran2939 wrote:I'm going to be put back into that pitiless place of prison again soon, the one where they make us "learn" for our own "good", some know this ghastly place as "school", and in a couple of weeks I won't have as much time on my hands. So there's even less chance of me coming to do stuff on the server :l

Lucky you, i start on monday. 

Ok, where we upload the server is completely up to sret. I have a copy on my computer, and I can upload it where it's needed whenever. I've donated what I think is enough to the account sret has with the hosting company, so hopefully when we get our subscription started again, I can just get the world on and we start playing

excellent. I have some plans I want to experiment with. Hint: the farm caves will be VERY functional.  

Warning: If you dislike plurals designated with a "z" as opposed to the common "s", please feel free to recoil in terror at the following statement.
Big floating islandz with waterfallz, make it happenz. We mustz.

Well this is quite the setback.

At least the majority of the city is still intact and we can probably rebuild things a bit better than we did before. I have been inactive most of the summer and school is starting again, but I should still have plenty of opportunities to get online and get stuff done now that the server is running again.

One reason I think that the server activity has died out is because we have been working on the same projects for some time now. I still want to see the farm caves completed but maybe we should change things up for a while. Whatever we do, its good to see most of the active members still sticking around.