SocialFeed is Back!
September 1, 2007
After a tough period of complete shutdown, the SocialFeed service is back up at http://socialfeed.cc. Thank you for checking the Website and the blog even while we were down.
We are sorry to say that we were unable to recover all of the data. Before telling you what we have recovered and what we have lost, let me explain briefly what happened.
We had two major issues that struck us at the same time: a MySQL database corruption and a physical crash of our server drive.
The physical crash of our server drive was the main reason for the interruption of service. However, shortly before our drive crashed, we discovered that our database was not correctly backing up. The backup shell was dumping only 10-20% of the data. While looking into this issue, we were confronted with the disc crash and were forced to stop everything. What horrible timing!
We sent our HDD to a data recovery service immediately, and fortunately, we were able to recover the data successfully. However, even after the HDD recovery, we found that the database was partially corrupted. We have been working hard to recover lost data from our latest but incomplete backups in order to re-launch our service again with as little data loss as possible.
What we’ve successfully recovered:
- User data
All user data and configurations before the crash were recovered with no loss.
- User relationship data
All the explicit relationships (called “friends” in SocialFeed) were successfully recovered and restored. Implicit friends (called “similar users”) have also been restored.
- Feeds and subscriptions
All the feeds subscribed to by users have been recovered and restored.
What we’ve lost:
- All past stories (approximately 500,000 items).
Stories published before the crash and during the period when the service was down have been lost.
- History
As we have lost all of the past stories, we have also lost all the history related to them.
- Saved and deleted stories
Saved stories and the stories forwarded from your friends are also gone.
We are terribly sorry for these losses and the extended downtime, but we are happy that all user data has been successfully recovered.
SocialFeed has begun collecting newly published stories, and we will release several new features which we developed during the long “vacation”. We hope you will come back again and take advantage of our unique recommendation service. We are working hard to improve the stability of our systems and to make the service more useful and more fun to use!
Humbly yours,
The SocialFeed Team
