The Post Erasure Event, as it has now been named, was a catastrophic data loss event on the Cracked Egg Studios web site that took place some time between April 16, 2009 and May 10, 2009, during testing of the upgrade process for VaultWiki 2.3.0 that was in development.
After the event occurred, an investigation revealed that a condition was flawed in a database query designed to synchronize the content of wiki pages, which VaultWiki 2.x stored as forum posts, against the current revision of those pages. As a result, all wiki pages that had no revision history, as well as all posts that were not even wiki pages, had their content replaced with empty string text, making those posts blank.
The problem prompted administrators to attempt to restore the web site against the last database backup, but they discovered that automated database backups had been failing for over a year, so there was no usable backup available.
Instead, administrators attempted to reconstruct the affected posts using various cache entries, which allowed them to save the content of many posts. As a result, only the original content of the following content was irreparably lost, all of which happened to be Card of the Day-related wiki pages:
After the event occurred, an investigation revealed that a condition was flawed in a database query designed to synchronize the content of wiki pages, which VaultWiki 2.x stored as forum posts, against the current revision of those pages. As a result, all wiki pages that had no revision history, as well as all posts that were not even wiki pages, had their content replaced with empty string text, making those posts blank.
The problem prompted administrators to attempt to restore the web site against the last database backup, but they discovered that automated database backups had been failing for over a year, so there was no usable backup available.
Instead, administrators attempted to reconstruct the affected posts using various cache entries, which allowed them to save the content of many posts. As a result, only the original content of the following content was irreparably lost, all of which happened to be Card of the Day-related wiki pages: