This is just unbelievable.  I am sure many fo you, like us, have dealt with plenty of machines that run fine 24/7 over years and years.

Today WinCustomize lost another server to total hardware failure. This is the THIRD server in 3 months. This one in some ways was worse and the timing was particularly bad.

The SQL database was on that machine. Luckily, because of our previous experiences, we have backups. But because of an additional glitch, the auto-backup didn't work which means we lost all the database changes since our last manual backup which was just before we left on the holidays. Net result is that we lost any uploads between the time we went away for Christmas (22nd?) and yesterday.

You can imagine how frustrated we are. Oh, we have a pretty good idea the commonolity on this (all 3 servers were quite very new, from the same provider with the same OS). But we won't get into public finger pointing. 

It's just incredible though. We have el-cheapo servers here that have run 24/7 for the past 5 years without any problems.

We'll have the libraries restored with what we have. If authors who have recently submitted stuff could resubmit their stuff we appreciate it and apologize for the inconvenience. Ironically, we have the files (the crash in November wiped out the physical files but the database was fine). I'm just glad we keep backups.

Thanks for your patience and support. Unfortunatley, we are now down a main server again. This one was our fastest/newest (and most expensive) machine unfortunately.

If anyone needs me, I'll be over here pulling my hair out.