"Catastrophic Failure" at Myth-Weavers

[Debatra]

https://www.myth-weavers.com/showthread.php?t=389153

Apparently, anything newer than July 25, 2016 is gone now. A lot of people here use Myth-Weavers, so you'll probably want to check your sheets.

[Deophaun]

That'll teach me. From now, saving all sheets to PDF.

You get what you pay for.

[Gamgee]

Haven't used it in eons but that sucks. I had a few chars there I liked. Ah well still okay with it. I'm the kind of guy who can remember my current games sheet's in my head.

[Fri]

They only lost newer sheet apparently (hopefully). I have a bajillion sheet there, but all are old. So it was actually a blessing that my group hasn't got any games since June 2016.

[Kid Jake]

God bless 'em anyway. It sucks, but I'm looking at this as the digital equivalent of knocking a cup of coffee all over my binder...except this is the only time i've actually lost something on MW, so I'm still coming out ahead.

[Knaight]

It's times like these that affirm my decision to keep documents in paper form instead of using a computer machine.

[Fri]

It's times like these that affirm my decision to keep documents in paper form instead of using a computer machine.

Paper? Paper can get burned! Or eaten by dogs!

Use your mind as nature intend it.

[Knaight]

Paper? Paper can get burned! Or eaten by dogs!

Use your mind as nature intend it.

That's more or less my approach to GM notes.

[Dimers]

Paper? Paper can get burned! Or eaten by dogs!

Use your mind as nature intend it.

Without debating the nature of "mind", may I point out that brains too can be burned and/or eaten?

[Doorhandle]

Without debating the nature of "mind", may I point out that brains too can be burned and/or eaten?

Redundancy is more important than medium as far as records go: Even things written in stone can shatter.

Of course, I say this fearlessly because I didn't have anything worthwhile on mythweavers...

[Coretron03]

Or eaten by dogs!

http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0257.html

But still, that sucks. I Had some really nice characters at mythweavers and may or may not have got too excited and statted out my (currently level 2) wizard at level 20 .

[Temotei]

Dang. The most annoying part of this is going to be comparing gear my party lost to my lists for treasure I have scattered all over the place. Oh, and a couple of full character sheets but only one that I was really excited about keeping. Sad day. Oh well. I can redo a lot of the damage without too much effort and the rest...well, it's fine. I'll probably do a better job on the second time around anyway.

[SilverLeaf167]

Personally, the only things I really lost were about a dozen NPCs (none of which were urgent or set in stone anyway), the online copy of a PC I also have a paper version of and a few back-up characters I never would've used anyway. A shame, but not that horrible.

I feel worse for the players I'm DMing for, really. Myth-Weavers had the only copies of their characters. They were only level 4 and the campaign had just started, though, so rebuilding shouldn't be too hard, but it still sucks (especially for the less system-savvy one who's gonna need my help with it).

I pretty clearly fall in the camp of "bad but still negligible compared to the use I've gotten out of the site over the years".

[Deophaun]

For all who have lost precious characters, never to return:

Spoiler

Show

[kyoryu]

https://www.myth-weavers.com/showthread.php?t=389153

Apparently, anything newer than July 25, 2016 is gone now. A lot of people here use Myth-Weavers, so you'll probably want to check your sheets.

Ugh. Primary failure (which didn't seem to be recognized): Doing major maintenance without doing a full db backup.

[SilverLeaf167]

Ugh. Primary failure (which didn't seem to be recognized): Doing major maintenance without doing a full db backup.

Oh, believe me, I read through the thread (painful as it was) and it was acknowledged, several times, by all sides.
It's even in the postmortem added to the opening post:

I should have taken a backup then. I always had in the past.

-snip-

I should have taken a backup at this point, before delving deeper. I didn't.

-snip-

At this point I should have checked where those files were, and taken a backup of either the whole file I was about to delete or of the entire filesystem. In my panic to fix the situation more quickly, I neglected to do either and deleted the file.

-snip-

I'm also heavily considering a script to kick off a backup when I log into the database server, both for convenience and to remind me of the potential gravity of even the most mundane task.

[kyoryu]

Heh, must have missed that.

Well, I doubt he'll repeat that error. Ever.

[Flickerdart]

"Did we back that up?" is one of those questions that's a lot more suspicious when asked with urgency.

[kyoryu]

"Did we back that up?" is one of those questions that's a lot more suspicious when asked with urgency.

A couple of times at my company we considered doing maintenance without a fresh backup.

My lead and I were both horrified and screamed that this would not happen.

[cobaltstarfire]

I think I only lost one character, but it was a character that I keep remaking in various ways anyway (and the game is on hiatus/probably dead to boot).

This really sucks for more active players, but I wouldn't characterize it as a catastrophic failure personally. Having seen a community website go through a true catastrophic failure and eventually die.

For all who have lost precious characters, never to return:

Spoiler

Show

video

I....what?

[Dragonexx]

Fortunately, all I lost was one character I made for the fun of it and probably wasn't going to ever use, and minor tweaks on another that can be easily added back in.

[ATHATH]

Press F to pay respects.

F

[J-H]

I use TTW due a personal preference (my monitor/screen setup is an edge case that M-W doesn't support), so I didn't lose any data. Most of the characters in the games I'm running, as well as in most of the games I'm playing in, are gone.

I keep decent notes and I think we can rebuild everything in the games I'm running pretty easily by deriving stats from posted statblocks, skillpoints, and loot lists (every DM IC post is in a word document).

The games I'm in? Some of them are probably going to end. The rest will probably be on hiatus for at least a week.

I'm going to start downloading my sheets and saving them as PDFs every so often.

I'm also overdue to back up my own hard drive....

[martixy]

So... I lost the most complex sheet I had ever done.
Being this complex however, I had all the data scattered throughout various documents.
Most amusingly, I had it(and still have it) open on my tablet. Its clunky, but it amounted to nothing more than a tedious copy/paste job.

I guess I should count myself lucky.

It is however the latest in in a series of almost apocalyptic potential d&d related disasters. You see last month the drive where all of my campaign notes resided perished. Thankfully I had placed a copy on my tablet just before the holidays and hadn't really worked on it during that time so almost nothing had been lost. Thankfully it was my system drive that gave up the ghost so all I lost there was time(to reinstall), a few semi important documents and my 4 months running Civilization savegame.

It was all the incentive I needed to finally acquire an actual backup drive, so I didn't have to throw myself out of a window in case an actually important drive died.

The moral of the story I'm trying to convey here is - don't wait.

[PersonMan]

So... I lost the most complex sheet I had ever done.
Being this complex however, I had all the data scattered throughout various documents.
Most amusingly, I had it(and still have it) open on my tablet. Its clunky, but it amounted to nothing more than a tedious copy/paste job.

In that case, you could've saved yourself some time and work by just changing one cell on the sheet and saving it.

[daniel_ream]

A couple of times at my company we considered doing maintenance without a fresh backup.

Given how ridiculously simple and cheap disk space, snapshots and data mirroring are I'm still surprised things like this happen.

[Deophaun]

In that case, you could've saved yourself some time and work by just changing one cell on the sheet and saving it.

That would have lost the data. Myth-weavers only saves the changes, not the whole sheet.

[martixy]

That would have lost the data. Myth-weavers only saves the changes, not the whole sheet.

It also did not work, as on the blank sheet, this is the first thing I tried.

[Hawkstar]

I just hit space+backspace on all the data fields I wanted to restore on my one open character sheet. I guess that would be more tedious on a tablet than typing on a computer, though.

[Starbuck_II]

Well, it messed up a campaign of Hell's Vengeance I was running, my players need to redo characters.

Also the last dudes I made a character when applying for a recruiting. Didn't get in, but still liked those characters.