Gamersyde data loss

• BlimBlim
• Wednesday, November 13, 2013 | 9:28 AM
• 21 comments

Gamersyde PS4 Xbox One Wii U

Some of you guys already contacted us about, but we were waiting to try all solutions before actually announcing it, we suffered a major data loss over the week end. To sum up, we lost all our videos from January 1 to August 28 of this year. More details inside.
Update: Torrents are working again.

Until this summer we had three levels of storage for our videos:
- A live download server with 1 to 2 years of videos
- A storage server (known as backup server on the download page) with 2 to 3 years of videos
- A backup server with all our videos since we started 10 years ago.

For financial reasons we had to stop renting the first server at the end of August this year, and migrate to a server with much less disk space but also much cheaper for our downloads.

Our backup server is full since the beginning of the year, and we simply couldn't afford to buy a new one (it was either this, or go to E3, basically).

I'm sure you guys have already guessed what happened by now. Our second server died over the week-end. This 6 years old server used a RAID5 composed of 8 hard drives (some of them had already died and been exchanged with no problems), but it looks like something went wrong in the server PSU and 2 hard drives died at the same time, leading to an unusable array, and basically no way of recovering anything.

Most members of the Gamersyde team still have their own videos on their PCs, so we should be able to upload these again, but for everything else there is no simple way of recovering them. I will put in place a special stats page for us that will allow us to check and see which videos are popular enough to go and find them again, but we can't do much more than that. The streams are still working, at least.

The site itself was basically unaffected by this issue. All our scripts we use to put videos online were running on that particular server, but I managed to transfer everything to a new virtual machine. The only thing missing now, besides 9 months of videos, is the torrent system, but it should be back today, or by the end of the week at worse.