Fire start ...

During the night of March 9 to 10, 2021, one of the buildings of the OVH datacenter located in Strasbourg caught fire. Despite the rapid intervention of the firefighters, one of the four buildings housing the servers was completely destroyed. More info here.

No chance..

The Kiwish site has been hosted by OVH since its inception in 2013. Since 2016 it has been located in Strasbourg in the SBG2 building which went up in smoke that night. The database being in the same place, the site data was therefore washed away with the fire.

What about the backup?

There was a script which took care of making a backup of the database every evening but which suddenly stopped working on January 23, 2020. I realized this during the first containment but being taken by others projects I decided to take care of it later...

What are the consequences?

The Kiwish site was unavailable from March 10 until April 4, 2021. The last backup of the site dated 23 January 2020 has been reinstated. This means that any gift added or deleted as well as any account created since has been lost. I invite people who have lost their account to recreate one here and other people to sort through their lists in order to update them.

The lessons to be learned

This fire taught many people a great lesson. Zero risk does not exist despite all the precautions that may be taken. I was naive to postpone restarting the backup system until later, thinking that the server was out of danger in a datacenter equipped to face all kinds of danger. What is certain is that this will not happen again and that my backup systems, whether for Kiwish or another project, will be more robust and better monitored.

Kiwish apologizes for the inconvenience this fire may have caused.