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What happened to content saved on Neopoet before Fall 2010?

Answer: 

Neopoet suffered a server hardware failure on September 24, 2010.

We ran into trouble when we tried to restore the most recent backup. In the summer we began using a leading commercial vendor to create and store our backups. Unfortunately, we realized that these backups were not created properly -- we were unable to restore our server from them.

We sent our server hard drive to a consulting firm which specializes in recovering data in these cases (Fields Data Recovery). Their initial opinion, based on a phone consultation, is that there was a 95% chance of recovery. Unfortunately, they did not open or work on the drive within the promised timeframe. After much discussion, they finally allowed us to pick up our drive from them (with one condition -- they had shipped it to Wales, England without our knowledge, and we had to send somebody in person!). Since Wales is a long way from Brooklyn, we were fortunately able to find somebody locally to do this.

The drive was then sent to ACS Data of Texas. Our hope was that they would perform a recovery like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul97jWv2PKY
Unfortunately, after using three sets of drive heads (at significant cost to themselves) they decided that they were unable to recover data on the drive. Later, they shipped the drive back. It is in our possession, but other vendors would like to charge us $3,000 and up to perform a recovery (with the prospect of an open ended cost above that if they run into any difficulty).

We deeply apologize for this. We know how important it is that Neopoet is a reliable, consistent service. Going forward, we have a much more sophisticated backup strategy in place. We have three methods: a real time copy to a second, on-site hard-drive, a near-real-time stream from our database to an off-site database server, and a daily backup of the full site to a different service (and finally, the commercial vendor that supplies the backup server takes their own backups of the server). Unfortunately, we previously only had one of the three (the daily backup) and this, we realize, was not adequate.

We have also posted a limited version of the site from our most recent complete backup (before May 2010) to http://archive.neopoet.com. Functionality is limited -- the intent is to just give access to the backup for purposes of retrieving your information.

The current version of Neopoet was launched in early 2011.

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