About the recent downtime and data loss

23 November 2019

9 January 2021

2 min read

The past few days have been mental, that's something I don't often get to say and I have two kids!

We've worked hard to get the site back up and running as quickly as possible and that meant we had to overcome a lot of challenges.

Here's a quick summary of the events that led up to the downtime. Our server provider had a node failure on one of their servers, that server just so happened to contain our database server, that's fine right? We have a backup right? Unfortunately not.

We used Ploi for server management and they cancelled our auto-backups due to a technical error on their end in October and failed to notify us via email or even a notification on their website. That's when panic set in for me.

So where does that leave us? Well, we initially wanted to rollback to the October database copy and a backup copy of the site files, but the technical challenges were huge and our attempts were unsuccessful. Instead, I rebuilt the site from scratch and Sean managed to fix up the database and connect it to the rebuilt site. Fortunately, we have retained 98% data, unfortunately, none of that is relevant to Football Manager 2020.

Where does that leave us? Well, we still have our P20 kits and our Standard Mega Logopack, we still have our Real Name Fix and our Data Update. The only thing we're missing is some key discussions in our forums and your amazing tactics, which you should upload as we're launching our tactic testing service soon.

If you were a premium member before the data loss, please refer to this page. We will ensure you are compensated and we will double your current subscription.

Are we safe in the future? I'm going to positively say yes. We are now set up with three individual backup providers and that should ensure this never happens again.

We really love our community, we are one of the longest-serving football manager fansites and we've never experienced anything like this in the past. I hope this serves as a caution to us but also I hope together we can rebuild. In 2019 a lot of forums are inactive and have died an ungrateful death, but FM Base has always been a huge aggregator of discussions and varying opinions. Let us keep it that way.

Let's never change, let's rebuild. The twitter hashtag rings true.

One last thing, old attachments are being reimported from tomorrow. Never fear!

#WeAreTheCommunity

About the author

FM Base
The FM Community since 2005