Lost data!

Since I've only just joined this site, I've just lost over 700 movies I spent probably spent two days inputting. Moreover, ratings.

"Important - Due to a database error we have lost ratings and added items for the last 3 weeks, reviews and custom lists are not affected, appologies to anyone who has lost data due to this."

That's the only explanation. Totally unimpressed. Would expect some decent data management for admin?! Backups? Are we going to get a better explanation? Now I have to go build up that database from scratch *again*. You can be sure it won't be here.

A good thing to know is I have been here for almost a year and this is the first time anything like that has happened, though I also dislike that little explanation

I should add, I also inputted 391 books too. Gone.

I lost quite a bit of stuff as well, not as much as you did, but it was somewhat easy to get back. just go to movies, look under the tags that you'd think those movies might be under and check the first 50 pages of Movies, you'll find all of the ones you need... i think(Thats what I did)

There is not much more to say, the data loss was actually a lot worse and a backup was restored from 3 weeks ago, unfortunately other more recent backups were also damaged/incomplete. There is a little more information in this thread :
www.listal.com/groups/viewthread/8152/

I can understand you being very annoyed but I also find this situation very depressing for me, having built up this site over the years have have such as black mark on it now is very sad.

if i got tom right, then the problem was not so simple. it seems that some parts of the database that stores for instance the rating information got slowly corrupted for a certain period, which is the reason why a simple restore of the data wouldn't suffice (there first "clean" restore of the data - before the corruption began - was three weeks ago). but even then, listal is a free service that doesn't guarantee restores of lost data. heck, there are even professional mail hosts out there that don't guarantee restores.

that said i don't think it's a good situation (i lost some hundred items too...), but this kind of things happen, even in professional enviroments. at least tom expanded the export/import-feature so anyone who is concerned about his/her data has some tools to safe and recover them in the future him/herself.

Tom - the link you give is for *this* thread?

i think tom meant these:

www.listal.com/groups/viewthread/8153/
www.listal.com/groups/viewthread/8112/

I have made a dedicated thread and linked to it from the announcement, I should have done this before admittedly. Link is above in Bael's post

I also lost my data, about 400 movies added recently, i made me feel like losing time. Is there a chance to happen again? cause i wouldn't like to loose my time again.

If everyone starts to make back-ups regularly by Exporting their data, then this will not be as much of a problem again.

Paulinha, this is the first time i've encountered such a crash, so likeliness of it happening again is slim. though with IT, anything can happen I suppose.

best thing is to do an Export *after* you add a large chunk of entries.

So in other words there's no chance to back up the data of the last 3 weeks? Really annoying, as I started my archive (with 180 items) 3 weeks ago and now shrank to 16 items...

p.s. just realized that tags remained, even after the crash.

I 'lost' michael clayton movie, but i saw that I rated it 8/10 because I reviewed it. So i re-added it, hit refresh, and ALL my tags re-appeared.

so if people rated AND tagged, its some good news. just re-add them to your watched/want to watch list, and the tags should re-appear

...or just re-add one of your existing tags/a new one and it'll refresh them.

When the data was lost, I deleted my entire collection, deciding to start fresh, then was further frustrated when I saw that ALL of my lost titles, plus all the ones I had just spent tons of time deleting, were brought back. How annoying. I mean, it's not like you can just click "select all"...so you have to manually select each title to check it for deletion. Now I have to go and do that all over again.


Plus, something is going on, because I keep posting reviews, and my points do not ever change anymore. And, when the loss of data happened, then was restored, my rank went from about 29 to 35 in one day, so something more than just listed titles was lost, and it's annoying. I just posted two reviews, and NO CHANGE in my points at all. What's the point of using a site that has such problems going on?

Maybe it was because in the past week almost EVERYONE rated like 200+ items


would it be possible that such an addition to the rating system would cause it to crash?

if so, maybe we should be careful about adding 200+ ratings to it...

cuz apparently, it happened only when A LOT(everyone on here posted something like 150+ rated items) of people rated a LOT(150-200+) items

I'm perfectly fine with it, it gave me a chance to restart my movies section and I found about... 50 more Movies then I would have if I had never gotten it deleted.