My Friends,
These past weeks have been extremely difficult. You may have noticed the board was acting strange in the days leading up to the crash. This was because the server?s operating system was corrupted somehow. E-mails stopped flowing and I could not log into the console. I asked our ISP for a manual reboot.
She never came back up and on-line. This particular box was three years old without an incident.
I paid the ISP to investigate the problem. They reported back the server?s OS was not repairable and needed to be rebuilt. I asked them and paid for a rebuild on a new hard drive and asked them to copy the Message Board data from the old drive to the new.
The server was rebuilt the same day, but my request for the data copy went unanswered for days. I called the ISP each day asking for a status report and escalating each time. Well, today (03 May) I was called by some manager. He told me that his team ignored my request and simply reinstalled the server?s OS onto the old hard drive, which erased six years of data, posts, artwork, etc.
I went to my backup copy, which was old, but better than nothing. To my dismay, it was also corrupted. The SPL has been lost and there is nothing I can do about it. To add insult to injury, I had to pay for this privilege: about $500.
I shudder to think about the priceless information that has been lost. The SPL Message Board was a real time capsule of all things Springsteen since 2000. I hope some of you somehow have old posts on your hard drives and can help us get them back on-line. The information in our FAQs, the history of the SPL, and the tributes to the fans past and present should be reposted ? if at all possible.
Needless to say, we are all starting over. Thank you all for your support and for the incredible words of kindness and encouragement this past week. I promise to invest in a better backup system such that this hopefully never happens again.
CJ
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