Why was Trading Paints Down?
Heads up! This is a really old post. Some of the information may no longer be relevant.
What happened, what’s going on, and what’s next.
What happened?
While working to set up a new Trading Paints server to help performance, speed, and reliability, our hosting service provider mistakenly reformatted both the current, live Trading Paints web server in addition to our live backup server.
This resulted in the loss of all data and files on Trading Paints.
While we first thought we’d be able to recover everyone’s paint files and data after the our provider mistakenly wiped clean the primary Trading Paints server, we soon found out that a few hours after the first mistake, the provider also completely reformatted the backup server, resulting in total loss of data on both servers.
This is tough for us personally and has implications reaching further than Trading Paints. It’s truly a devastating loss.
What do we have?
We were able to maintain all user accounts from our own local backups, as well as the core Trading Paints application itself. You’ll be able to use Trading Paints as if there were no previous data on it, meaning for now, you’ll have to re-upload your paint schemes to both Your Paints and Showroom.
We chose to put this “shell” of Trading Paints back online so it’s at least possible to use custom paints while we work to recover any additional data we can.
We’re aware that many racers rely on the Trading Paints platform for painting and the impact this loss has on the community. We feel your pain.
What can we recover?
We’re working through our possibilities of recovering paint scheme files and data right now. For now, you’ll see some paint schemes marked as “Pending Recovery” in Trading Paints; these are the files that were lost.
We do have Showroom and paint scheme data up to about a year ago, but we realize that’s not tremendously helpful. We’ll slowly start to filter some of this in as we can load it.
Until we receive our disks from our server provider, we won’t know how much data we can recover.
What’s next?
Our server provider informed us that they couldn’t recover data off the disks they erased, but we’ve requested for them to send us the disks to see what we might be able to find ourselves. Since they reformatted eight disks in total, we’re remaining optimistic that data can be recovered.
We’re not sure if the fact that these were human errors by the server technicians helps or hurts the likelihood of recovery.
This process may take a week or more, and we can’t guarantee any sort of results. You’ll see some changes in Trading Paints over the next few weeks while we work to get back up to speed.
We’ve unfortunately been forced to close Paint Builder and team paint functionality temporarily we work through the recovery process, but it will return as soon as possible — this is only a short-term outage. Again, we understand this is a tool our Pro users rely on and paid for, and we’re doing everything we can to restore it quickly.
We’ll keep you updated through updates on Twitter.
In Racer’s Terms
We got wrecked. Then, the same car took out our backup car. We had to throw the red flag, and now we’re driving around in a car looking like this until we can head back to the shop for some repairs.
Thank You
We need to take a moment to acknowledge and thank you all for your patience, support, and positivity. When we first mentioned that Trading Paints would be down for a little while in the iRacing forums, we were afraid of upset racers who wanted their paint schemes. Instead, we were met with a ton of encouragement and positive comments. That goes a really long way for us, and we truly appreciate it.
We have quite a journey in front of us, but we’re totally committed to Trading Paints and this community. We appreciate each and every one of you. Even though the cause of the data loss was outside our power, we’ll do everything in our power to make things right. We can only hope that you continue your patience and understanding while we work through this challenge.
– Steve & Shawn
