Previously on Avault…

Backups are cool – when they work. Initially we thought that the fix would be simple – just boot up the backup. Unfortunately there wasn’t one. It hadn’t done its thing. There was no record of what once had been the Adrenaline Vault – or was there?

Deep in the jungles of darkest Brazil (okay, maybe in the suburbs, but work with me here) lived that well-known explorer of computer servers and databases – Saulo Benigno! What? You’ve never heard of Saulo? Then you’ve never been here. Saulo is the man behind the curtain, and fortunately for everyone concerned – a pack rat. Back in September, he’d been tweaking around in preparation for the new site design, and made a “just in case” backup. When the tweaking was done, a copy of the entire Vault was saved to his hard drive. So when the drums started to beat, and the scramble commenced, a hero emerged.

Saulo in conjunction with Andrew Waterman (our brilliant software engineer) were able to resurrect her from the ashes and within days the site was relaunched on our brand new shiny server (thanks to Angel). The evil, cute and fuzzy server gremlin was then forced to slink off, and in true Scooby Doo villain style: “I would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for that meddling Angel and that darn Brazilian Pack Rat.”

So, it was February, and our site had time traveled back to September, but without the forums (we’ll get to that part later). 5 ½ months of material had been lost, and we needed to get current and fast!

On another hard drive, far away in the snow belt of Upstate NY, our data had been found. Another OCD pack rat on the other side of the world had insanely saved every news story, every feature and every review that had been published on the site for the last two years. Enter Michael Smith, our assistant editor. His mission…retype every piece of HTML code, retype every word, and upload every image from the last five months (okay not EVERYTHING – we figured that no one was interested in five-month-old news), and hit the publish button for every…single…one. We locked him in his office at an undisclosed location in Philly (no cheating OBob), and refused to let him out until absolutely everything was republished. Don’t feel too bad for him, as we slid food under the door, and it only took three weeks.

But what about the forums? To find out the answer to this and other questions, tune in next time to this same Vault Channel.