The planet has imploded. :-( I'm looking in to it, but at the moment it is looking like a full rollback to Feb 1st. A total back up was taken at that time and the files from Feb 1st will load however a Windows Restore will be required to bring back the Cache server and Mail server to the correct point in time.
It looks like I may have broken something
with the hourly backups. I'm gutted
to say the least especially after what was one of our best months in January since we started. I realize of course my being gutted is not going to bring back the last week and I can only apologize at this point.
I say broke "something" because well I didn't touch the hourly backup routines and as far as I recall I haven't done so it quite some time. But with the changes that were made I guess it could only be me...
In short when the game does its hourly saves, it appears to save a subset of the information and not the complete world. Why this is I'm not entirely sure but I imagine that speed was definitely part of it, i.e. saving out 20Mb of data rather than 100Mb. It's always been that way from the code I started with. In the past, it has been possible to bring a server back from this subset of information, rather than having to go back to the last full backup. A true full backup is performed only when the model server is stopped and that is it. All other saves are these mini-saves.
Those of you who have been around for a while will understand what happens when the model server is stopped and restarted. Farms shut, Offices go a little nuts, commerce distribution tends to fluctuate as well. In short it takes a while to sort out. So stopping the model server is not something that happens very often, hence no true 100% backup occurs sometimes for weeks/months at a time between maintenance.
This is going to take a while to sort this out. :-(
