Hey all. Thank you so much for your patience today regarding the downtime.

What was the downtime for?
We received an email last week notifying us that some time over the next few months our servers would be physically moved from one location to another, and they promised us ample time to prepare for this move. We then received an email a few days later stating that our servers would be moved the following day, and that a time slot of 12 hours was designated although they predicted only 2-3 hours of actual downtime would be needed. We were alarmed that it was so short notice and the window in which the downtime could happen was so long. We luckily managed to rearrange the servers to be moved on 1st May. This was the main reason for the downtime.

So what happened?
1st May rolled around and we waited with anticipation for the servers to shut down. As both coders are in the UK we were hoping that they would take the servers down just in time for us to get online and handle the aftermath. What we didn't expect was just how messed up the aftermath would be.

What should have been a simple 3 hour job turned into a nightmare day. The actual moving of the servers was over and done with early on in the day, but when we logged in we discovered that pretty much the entire database was corrupted. We investigated the logs on the servers to find that the host had started a graceful shutdown (to those who don't know, this means that they were closing everything down before turning the server off) but as time went on we believe they became impatient with it taking so long. The startup logs showed that the "Database was not shut down normally".

We have seen almost an entire day of downtime not because of the initial move, but because we have been trying to restore all the data that was corrupted.

What does this mean?
We have essentially had to do a minor rollback of the game. We store regular backups of our most important data so lions, members and hoards are the most recent - although there may be some time disconnects as lions were backed up most recently, then before that was hoard, then before that was members, etc.

Unfortunately the one table we were unable to restore has been messages. The inbox table was completely corrupted and we have no workable backup. We are continuing to try and restore everything, and the message system will continue working as it did before, but until further notice we are unable to retrieve your messages. We will be working through the night to try and get inboxes back together, but we have no guarantee that we can get this working. We’ll do our very best however!

You may notice that there was no rollover today - this failed to run regardless as it was due to run in the middle of the time the hosts took our servers offline. Due to the large amount of downtime today, we decided not to run it again, so nobody will have a rollover until tomorrow, as you normally would.

Here is a list of the backups and when they were taken to give you an idea of what data might not quite line up for you:
* Lions may not be as 100% recent as you may have wanted if you were on and making changes to lions (claiming new, customising, breeding etc) close to when we went down. We imported a backup very close to the downtime, which was taken approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes before the server went down.
* The same goes for hoard, which is a backup taken 25 minutes before the lions backup.
* User logs were imported from a backup taken 45 minutes before hoard.
* The rest of the database is imported from a backup taken 30 minutes before the user log backup.

This means that any activity taken after these backups is now lost. We hope you can appreciate how close the backups were to downtime to avoid further loss.

Lion counts may appear incorrect for those who had new lion activity between the main database backup and the lion backup (1 hour and 40 minutes gap), but this should fix itself on your next rollover.

GB purchases are of particular importance, and any that do not show up in your purchase log on the game or appear to have been credited to your account should be reported. Please send your PMs to Katze (#3) regarding this and they’ll get recredited. Mention in the PM the time/date of purchase, transaction ID, amount bought and the email address you used via Paypal.

We’d just like to reiterate that we will be spending a considerable amount of time and effort trying to get inboxes back for you guys, but we can’t make promises. We’d also like to apologise for all of this mess - sadly it was out of our control, but we’re doing our very best to rectify everything!