Great Rollback

The Great Rollback was a catastrophic failure of both human and computer systems in 2012. In quick succession, an established backup procedure was inadvertently not being followed and a server hard drive corrupted, destroying both the forum records and the onsite backups for several months.

The Shelter was activated for over a week while administrative staff tried to recover backups by any means possible, and several users established clever records of lost posts from Google caches. In the end, however, only a very small amount of the posts were recovered in any format, and site activity dropped significantly following the return.