JENKINTOWN, Pennsylvania (GBT) — A recent update to Genealogy By Tim G.'s primary webserver triggered hard drive corruption last Saturday, leaving the server's file system in a read-only state, and the server's Apache2 and MariaDB services unable to launch. Backup servers were deployed but were several months out of date. Website users may have noticed a temporary reversion to the website's February 2022 state. Podcast listeners may have noticed the temporary disappearance of recent episodes, stretching back to Season 2, Episode 2.
"The website wouldn't load, but the data was safe and accessible," said Tim, chief genealogist and webmaster for the site. "I was able to update the backup server pretty quickly to get the site back online and current."
Subsequent efforts to repair the site's primary server with the fsck tool proved impractical. "Fsck shoveled the webserver's entire file system into the lost+found folder. I wasn't about to sift through all that. Reimaging the backup server onto the main server was the path of least resistance this time."
Although the site's primary webserver was back online by Wednesday evening, reimaging the backup server was not without drawbacks. "I had some experimental email administration tools set up on the primary web server that were not on the backup server. Those will have to be rebuilt, but that won't be a big problem. The site is up and running again, and that's most important right now."
Corruption of the site's primary server was not the only technological kerfuffle Genealogy By Tim G. suffered last weekend. An errant Linux command also caused massive data loss on Tim's local genealogy machine.
"Funny story. I temporarily copied the data from my primary server to my local machine's Documents folder. When it came time to delete this information from my local machine, I accidentally issued the command to delete my entire home folder, not just the extra copy of the webserver data. ?"
Genealogy By Tim G. webservers contain full backups of the Genealogy data on Tim's local machine, but those backups are current only as of the GBT site's most recent GEDCOM update, which in this case occurred on the fourth of January.
"It sounds a lot worse that it is. Most of the work I've done these past several months has been on the FamilySearch Family Tree. The rest of it has been Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com downloads, which shouldn't be too difficult to replace. I honestly have been too busy with my day job obligations these past six months to do much more than that."
The greatest loss was likely to have been gravestone photos recently taken at Crescent and Arlington Cemeteries in Pennsauken, New Jersey. "It's annoying, but it's part of the cost of doing business," Tim lamented. "These things happen. If the worst thing to come of it is that I have to ride out to Pennsauken again and have lunch at Bobby Ray's Pennsauken Tavern again, then I consider myself lucky." ⬮
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