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Comment by hunterb123

3 years ago

What was the test to determine the dataloss?

Informal. My last upvote was pretty close to when HN went down, so I expected my karma to go down, but it didn't.

Also I remember the "Why we're going with Rails" story on the front page from before it went down.

I came to the same conclusion by observing that there are posts and comments from only eight hours ago.

  • So that means dataloss.. Probably restored from backup.

    Good news for people who were banned, or for posts that didn't get enough momentum :)

    edit: Was restored from backup.. so def. dataloss

    • 8 hours of downtime, but not data loss, since there was no data to lose during the downtime.

      Last post before we went down (2022-07-08 12:46:04 UTC): https://hn.algolia.com/) just before we brought HN back up, and their most recent comment and story were behind ours. That means our last backup on the ill-fated server was taken after the last API update (HN Search relies on our API), and the API gets updated every 30 seconds.

      I'm not saying that's a rock-solid argument, but it suggests that 30 seconds is an upper bound on how much data we lost.

      10 replies →

    • > So that means dataloss.. Probably restored from backup.

      If the server went down at XX:XX, and the backup they restored from is also from XX:XX, there isn't dataloss. If the server was down for 8 hours, the last data being 8 hours old isn't dataloss, it's correct.