The steamlocomotive.info database has been damaged, and before I continue I want to state plainly that this is NO ONE'S fault but my own. Working on the database at 4 am I made a typo that had the effect of wiping out state and province information for all 28,500 records in the database.

For most countries, this doesn't matter, even slightly as the information is neither recorded nor used. However, for the following countries, it is a serious matter and will require some considerable effort to correct:

United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Spain, Russia, China, South Africa, Japan, United States, and Australia.

Here's the bad news, both I and our hosting provider believed that the database was being backed up nightly, and that therefore this wasn't an issue. That assumption proved to be startlingly incorrect. So, for approximately 10,689 locomotives state and province information will have to be editted back in to the database by hand.

Until that is done, you won't see the locomotives in the listed countries with the geographic browser. You can still find them with the search tool, but when displayed the state or province information will be wrong.

No information has been lost, oddly enough. I have a paper copy (shudder) of all of the information. So...I've returned the site to operation and will discuss progress on the repairs in the Forums on my site, rather than cluttering this one.

Of the listed countries, I've finished Canada. And it works correctly. So if you go to http://steamlocomotive.info/canada.cfm and click on any of the provinces you'll get accurate information.

I'm going to start on the United States next. I'm seriously thinking about writing a little tool to help with the process.

Thank you for your patience.

having an active mirror is beneficial, a personal offline dupe would be good also.

Just got a call from the hosting company. They DO have a backup generated less than 24 hours ago. It just wasn't where they thought it was.

Restore in progress.

For perhaps the final word on this topic, please see:

https://steaminfo.wordpress.com/2017/06 ... 28th-2017/

Nothing got permanently broken and you didn't leave thousands of people stranded around the world (unlike British Airways). Glad to see you got it back up and running.

Sorry for your mishap and thank you for the reminder that I've gotten lax about backing up photos and such. The only backup I'm pretty thorough about is Quickbooks for business.

Steve

Thanks for the kind words. Backups, more backups and then more. My new motto.

Seriously, I've come to think that the preservation of data related to railroads and their history, their artifacts and their operations is as much railway preservation as is the preservation of artifacts.

steamlocomotive.info is a 15 year accretion of data, and should it be catastrophically lost, I'm not certain it could be wholly reconstructed. I'm 68 years old and I'm certainly not going to live forever. I need to start actively thinking and planning for what will happen to the website in the event of my demise (timely or otherwise).

This will require some thought.

Probably too late now, but don'[t forget about the Internet Wayback Machine http://web.archive.org, while they don't capture every page out there, they create snap shots of a lot of web pages.

http://web.archive.org/web/201706062324 ... tive.info/

Rich C.