Erictric

Toodledo, a free to-do list management application, is probably not having the greatest day in their history. Their site is down, and their scrambling to get it back up. Nope, wasn’t a hacker. According to the current text-only homepage, a major storm hit their datacenter, when generator power began powering their servers. Unfortunately, something went horribly wrong – all servers lost power. Even worse, the outage cause the site’s huge database to become corrupted. Currently, Toodledo is in the process of restoring all services through backups. Again, according to their website, “We have successfully restored all of the data up until June 10, 4am CST and we are working very hard to restore the remaining 12 hours of updates that happened before the servers crashed.”

Here’s the full message from the site’s homepage:

So, here’s the story. A big storm went through the city where our datacenter is located. The datacenter decided to proactively switch to generators. During the switch, something got screwed up, and the power went off for a few minutes. As (bad) luck would have it, this caused our database to get corrupted. We are currently working to bring it back online and restored from the live backup. The crack team at Rackspace is on the job. Thanks Rackspace! Unfortunately, the database is so large, that it will take some time to transfer and verify all the data. Hopefuly not more than a few hours. We know that this is very bad, and we apologize for any inconvience that this will cause. Please check the forums when we are back online for a full report.

Update: Its obviously taking longer than we expected and we are really sorry for that.

Update #2: I know that our downtime is totally unacceptable. I am literally sick to my stomach about this whole thing. We have successfully restored all of the data up until June 10, 4am CST and we are working very hard to restore the remaining 12 hours of updates that happened before the servers crashed. Obviously, this has been a major event. We had multiple simultaneous errors happen that have made recovery slower than anticipated. Because our database is so large (many many many gigabytes), it just takes a long time to transfer and import the data. I know that many of you are upset, and all I can say is that I am deeply sorry. We are already starting to rethink our backup strategy so that recovery doesn’t take so long in the future.

Thank You, backups!

[ source: TechCrunch ]