If you follow Film School Rejects’ Neil Miller on Twitter, you might have noticed that things started to go very, very wrong for the site yesterday morning. It started like this:
Film School Rejects is broken. I’m tempted to just leave it that way. Who fucking cares, anyway?
— Neil Miller (@rejects) July 21, 2015
Turned into this:
I am not ok.
— Neil Miller (@rejects) July 21, 2015
And ended up like this:
This feels like it might end up being the end for me.
— Neil Miller (@rejects) July 21, 2015
According to Miller, corrupted files at FSR’s web host threatened to wipe out the site’s entire nine-year existence, backups and all, leaving him in danger of permanently losing everything he and his contributors had put into it. (Click through and check out Miller’s mentions for a blow-by-blow.)
My entire life’s work was in the FSR database.
Now it’s gone. And @mediatemple says they can’t help.
What am I supposed to do now?
— Neil Miller (@rejects) July 21, 2015
Long story short, the site is finally back online, and if you’re inclined to look for a silver lining, the crisis forced him to miss a screening of “Pixels.” Here’s how he explained the situation after the fact:
Sometime around 10am Central time on Tuesday, something funny happened to the servers that house Film School Rejects. And while we don’t yet exactly know the extent of this “something funny,” we know what happened afterwards. The entire site’s content — more than 30,000 articles — disappeared. What followed was perhaps one of the darkest and most insane 24-hour periods in the history of this website. I had a complete meltdown on Twitter, numerous wonderful people offered good wishes and positive vibes and we began thinking about what we would do in the event that Film School Rejects could not be resurrected.
Could we start over? Sure. Could we turn it into a blog about pizza and Game of Thrones? Why not? Could we be reborn as a movie news parody site? That might actually have been fun.
Instead, we remained hopeful that everything would work out alright. And thanks to some hard work by some senior tech folks at our host, Media Temple, we are back up and running. There are still questions to be answered. Most importantly, why did this happen and what can we do to prevent it in the future? For now we’re just happy to be back in the game.
This is, needless to say, a nightmare scenario for anyone who works on the web, or enjoys the products of those who do. So if you’re a fan, click through and read Adam Belotto on “Marvel’s Villain Problem.” Just don’t all do it at once.
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