JUST RELEASED: Visit the Incredible PBX Wiki
What a week! If you read last week’s article, you already know that our hosting provider’s server experienced a 2-disk RAID failure (according to them) a week ago. Unbeknowst to us, the provider had discontinued making backups of domains that had grown beyond 10 gigabytes in size. That impacted the main PBX in a Flash site, pbxinaflash.com, as well as the PIAF Forum which is hosted on that site.
Beginning last Friday, we set up an alternative site on Google+. It would be an understatement to say that some of our fans were not overly enthusiastic about the new approach to community living. And, to be fair, much of the criticism was well deserved.
As much as we’d love to be rid of the headache of maintaining the PIAF Forum, it serves a huge audience and we have literally hundreds of gurus that chip in to make PBX in a Flash technical support second to none. So… what to do? Even though the current XenForo forum database in MySQL was almost totally destroyed, we still had a backup copy of the vBulletin forum from 15 months ago. Since we lost over seven years of data, recovering 85% of the content was certainly better than nothing. And recover it we did. By Tuesday night, we were back in business albeit limping along. In the meantime, a number of our gurus had collected snapshots from Google’s cache of more recent content on the site. We also have recovered most of the message threads from the old XenForo database although the threads lack the identity of the posters. Some of this content already has been restored, and there’s more to come. Unfortunately, Google begins purging content after several days and within a week almost all of it’s cache content is gone forever.
In any case, we’re glad to be back in business, and we hope all of you will once again lend a hand to restore the PIAF Forum to its former level of glory. If you had a forum account in the vBulletin days, you still should be able to log in with your old credentials. If not, sign up again, and we’ll get you set up in a day or two. It’s pretty amazing to see what’s been done in less than a day and a half, and we’re looking forward to the next hundred years of PBX in a Flash development and support. Come join the fun!
Deals of the Week. There are a couple of amazing deals that have just hit the street, but you’ll have to hurry. First, for new customers, Sangoma is offering a board of your choice from a very impressive list at 75% off. For details, see this thread on the PIAF Forum. Second, and speaking of backups, a new company called Copy.com is offering 20GB of free cloud storage with no restrictions on file size uploads (which are all too common with other free offers). Copy.com has free sync apps for Windows, Macs, and Linux systems. To take advantage of the offer, just click on our referral link here. We get 5GB of extra storage, too, which will help avoid another PIAF Forum disaster. Enjoy!
Originally published: Thursday, May 23, 2013
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