Recovering from the loss of our Tribute Photos
Valued Contributor –
In late April of 2014 the website tribute.perfectmemorials.com suffered a catastrophic failure. Quickly we were able to make sure that the written portions of each of the Tributes was made fully available, but our hearts sank here when we realized the situation with the images that had been uploaded to each Tribute. Due to configuration choices made years ago when maintenance was performed on our site, it became apparent that not only the primary location for the images was impacted but so were the backups.
Over the last few months we have made significant resource investments into restoring the images. After several promising early results, we have come to the conclusion there is no way we can restore the images in an acceptable manner. We are incredibly disappointed with this outcome.
In order to make sure this does not occur again, we have instituted changes that effect the entire Perfect Tribute site:
•Additional staff has been brought on board to effectively maintain and support the Tribute site.
•We have migrated the entire site to a different, fully managed dedicated host located in a Tier-4 Datacenter for the most reliability possible.
•We have implemented a robust backup solution with a documented process that validates the condition and readiness of all Tribute assets, including images.
•An additional feature has been developed and implemented that allows contributors at any time to create a backup of their tribute as a PDF, complete with photos and guestbook. This provides an offline version of the Tribute that can also easily be printed.
Additionally, we were able to find a very old backup of the entire site that had been made and taken offline in late 2011. All of the images contained in this backup have been restored to their proper locations on the site.
We sincerely apologize that this loss of data occurred. That we were able to restore the text was a major early success, but the loss of the images is deeply disappointing to us as well. We hope that you understand that we invested heavily in our attempts to get them restored.
Sincerely,
The entire Technology Department of Perfect Memorials