We had to restore a backup. Data from 1/9 - 1/14 has been lost.
Just as the headline reads, we’ve had to restore a backup. Unfortunately data from 1/9 - 1/14 has been lost. This means any posts and new user signups within that time will need to be recreated.
What happened? A new version of Discourse was released today. For almost two-years we’ve upgtraded to new versions of Discourse as they’ve been released without any incidents. Today fate caught up with us.
When we went through the upgrade process the Discourse application itself got corrupted requiring us to restore a filesystem backup.
How will we prevent this from happening again? We will change our upgrade processes to include take a snapshot of the VM prior to any upgrades so we can revert back quickly if we need to.
What happened to the data from 1/9-1/14? It’s gone. Permanently. Due to a rather unfortunate set of timing a new backup was being automatically generated while we were in the process of upgrading which rendered the automated backup taken today quite useless. This required us to restore an earlier backup.
Apologies.