Greetings and Salutations -

This evening about 11:00pm EST, during a reboot cycle, both the BellaOnline forum and main webserver had serious issues coming back up. We were able to get the forum server up. The main webserver suffered a fairly catastrophic failure. Over the past five hours I've been working strenuously with the server team to see what we could recover.

At this point I have gotten the site back live with data from **August 24** so the site wasn't completely down any longer. I figured slightly old site was better than no site at all. I will continue to work get get to the remaining data.

I have pushed the article IDs forward to number 300000. That way as you add in fresh content it won't overwrite where the "missing content" will go when / if we can get that restored. We're leaving a space for it.

Many of you keep backup files of the articles you load in, which we always recommend. If you reload an article, please let me know its title. I should be able to quickly find its original ID through a Google search and then update your new entry to have the original ID. That way any links to it will instantly work again. For weekly updaters, we've lost 7 to 8 articles. If you paste those back in I can have that aspect of your site "restored" fairly quickly.

I realize this is incredibly frustrating and I apologize profusely for the confusion while we repair from it. As it figures, I was in the middle of moving our three servers to a new hosting company when this all happened. I had the first server - the one with our BellaRadio on it - partially moved and was getting everything set up to move the forum/mail server and then the main server after them. My plan was to have everything complete by the end of next week. I was going to send you a note in a few days letting you know I was ready to begin the main switch and what to expect.

The servers must have sensed we were abandoning them. They knew we were about to escape. They were jealous of those new servers and threw a tantrum.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments at all. I am happy to lend a hand or help as I can. If you don't have personal backup files, often Google has a cache and other sites maintain caches as well. I can help you look for those options while I also work on restoring the original database from the damaged disc. Right now the disc has gone completely unresponsive so I'll be sending it to a data repair center for them to work on it.

I did a full backup and dump of the forums to my local machine so those are safe as of tonight. I intend to move the forums over to their new home in a few days, once I get things stable again. The move out of our current hosting facility is still progressing. It just got wildly more exciting than I thought it would be. I'll keep you informed of that progress as we go.

Those who have been with us since the early days of 2001 and 2002 remember when this sort of thing seemed to happen all the time. Hardware seems to like to fail at the worst possible time. Together we dust things off, sort things out, and life will go on :). We'll figure it out!

Again, feel free to contact me with questions and comments, and I'll do my best to sort things out as quickly as possible!

Sincerely,


Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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