Post-downtime issues post

A number of users have reported a smattering of missing books or data on books since the downtime.

After a day's work, we have nailed the problem down exactly—namely that we have a gap of data representing 21 hours last August (2017). Specifically between 12:05pm 08/12/2017 (UTC) and 9:02pm 08/13/2017 (UTC). We have confirmed there are no other such gaps.

The good news is that we believe that most or all missing books can be restored fully. But the problem is ticklish and will take some time to resolve. It's uncertain, but we may lose 21 hours of non-user data, such as Talk posts and CK edits. We're focusing on books first, as I think you'd want us to.

The fix will will take some days. First, we are anxious to do nothing wrong, on the theory that safety and exactitude are more important than speed. Accordingly, we spent the day being absolutely sure of what was going on, not to mention making more backups, checking secondary data storage, etc. Second, this involves same slow juggling of enormous files between servers that made our downtime so irritating and long. Then we'll have to do a lot of comparing of data in various systems. Of course, people keep adding books, including books they think are missing, and we'll have to take that into account with some sort of "do you still want these books?" message.

It's hard to explain, but the problem is not entirely restricted to books added during those 21 hours. For example, some members have reported books that seem to exist, but have no work page. In most cases, the book data is just fine with no restoration necessary, but the work was first created during these 21 hours, and the work will need to be restored, because a book without a work doesn't function correctly.

Thank you for your patience. Updates as we go.

Ah, nice. I found a couple of oddities, but couldn't see what they could have to do with the downtime. August 2017 makes more sense. I'll go look again.

I think I will stay away from editing my library until the all-clear to allow Tim and the team to get things sorted out.

Thanks for all the hard work on that one, Tim!

I think these two books disappeared because of the downtime.

144894720
144900173

Both are manual entries from 2017-08-13 which makes much more sense now that Tim has pointed to "between 12:05pm 08/12/2017 (UTC) and 9:02pm 08/13/2017 (UTC). " as having something to do with the error.

On this day is still missing.

I don't seem to be able to "about" works in Talk, only authors.

>1 timspalding: I commend your detective work. It looks like I am missing 3 books and 2 reviews, all from that time period. Good work narrowing that down! Will wait for updates.

I'm lucky, the only thing I did during that time was marking a book as 'read' and registering the date.
I was surprised to see it it in my "Currently Reading" collection when we came back, hehe

Thanks for the details on the timeframe - that let me check my backup to confirm that I don't have any books added during that timeframe. (Lost edits I can deal with. Lost books would be bad.)

I've gathered some more data on what changed in my library. Two books are missing and the rest of the changes looks like small potatoes, i.e.LC_Classification on Book_Id 22668205 disappeared.
Before it was
PT9875 .M5
and now it is just empty.

On Book_Id 22668240 Dewey_Decimal (and thus Dewey_Wording) has changed:

Dewey_Decimal 839.7
Dewey_Wording German > Literature > Literature in other Germanic languages > Swedish literature

changed to:

Dewey_Decimal 839.73
Dewey_Wording German > Literature > Literature in other Germanic languages > Swedish Fiction > Swedish literature

This looks like nothing in my library changed, but some of the linked stuff changed?

>2 bnielsen: >4 bnielsen:

Ah, nice. I found a couple of oddities, but couldn't see what they could have to do with the downtime. August 2017 makes more sense. I'll go look again.

Precisely. The diff is (work => book):

144894720 => 20061129
144900173 => 20062131

>8 lorax:

Rather than timeframe, look at the ids. The gap is the books between book id:

144845867 — 144911024

It affects works between workcode / work id:

20053375 — 20064171

About 10% of those books were deleted anyway, and some perfect of the works were aliased, etc.

>9 bnielsen:

The first classification may indeed belong to a LC class added during the downtime.

The second? I dunno. It might have simply been changed recently, or those are from the work level and the winning value changed. What are you comparing, exactly?

>10 timspalding: I'm comparing a tsv-export from before downtime and a tsv-export from after downtime. Some slack may be expected, since the first is slightly before downtime and the other is slightly after the downtime. I have two books missing in action and 14 small differences.

>11 timspalding: Are you going to be restoring all data types (such as the LC class added during the downtime you mention here) or just "missing books" & works as described in >1 timspalding:?

And what about data fields which were changed (rather than created) during that 21-hour window - will those changes be restored as well?

In our library we have some status Tags which are missing from thousands of books; it's possible those Tags were either first created or broadly applied after an inventory during those 21 hours, still looking through old notes to see if we can determine if that's the case (or if there's something else at play here, including the ever-present possibility of recent human error on our side). But if the fix won't restore those Tags anyway, we won't bother with those forensics and will switch over to trying to recreate our status Tags...

Thanks for nailing down the root of the problem so precisely, and even greater thanks for communicating it so openly!

Update: search indexes are temporarily off, as of yesterday afternoon, while developers work on the data restoration issue. Thanks for your patience in the meantime. We'll keep you posted on a timeframe of when to expect them back up, please hang tight for now.

>13 cesbooks:

So, that's the really nasty thing--sorting out all the little changes that have happened. That's why this isn't immediate. Some data can just go in, but for others we will to need to provide people with a list of additions and changes, and ask if they want them.

Thanks for the hard work. I won't touch anything more. Again I did restore one title as indicated in my first bug (The Life She Was Given). I hope you can restore the common knowledge to the two books with problems. As far as time frames - What is it all but Luminous was not released until September 26, 2017, so I could not have entered the common knowledge until well after your identified dates. I determined that I did not read this book until sometime in November and would have done Common Knowledge edits then. (Someone may have entered the book in August, perhaps.) The Life She was Given was released in July 25, 2017, so my entry probably fits in your time frame. Most of the Common Knowledge is missing. Please let me know when the work is completed.

I spend a lot of time doing Common Knowledge. I could never check on that data or replicate it, so I was worried about what I couldn't see. So glad you have all the data base back ups.

Oddity: I added The stone sky by N. K. Jemisin a few days ago.

On my Add Books page, it shows up without a title, but with the correct 523 other members noted in the margin.

In my catalog, no title and no other members: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/anglemark .

And clicking the author name is broken. On the Author page, it has the green check mark.

I did some research and found I was missing 4 books. I would have never noticed on my own.

We're still working on things—thanks for your patience everyone. We're keeping search indexing off for now, and there will be no new indexing for the next 24 hours. This means that newly added books will not show up in either site or Your Books search while we sort this out. Books added prior to this point will turn up just fine. Searches still function, but they won't find anything added to your catalog or the site after 04/09.

Additionally, imports are paused for now. There's no need to resubmit your import—they're still in the system, but they won't complete until we switch this back on.

Thanks again for your patience, everyone. We're sorry this is taking longer than we'd like.

>21 lorannen: Does any of this affect profile flagging? I note that profiles flagged hours ago, or even yesterday, are still around, even though they've been flagged numerous times. The profiles in both Spam fighters and the Spam Profile Hunt are still there, even though the side data (such as topics posted) are long gone.

>22 Lyndatrue: Yep, that process is off, too. I'm checking flagged-as-spam accounts a few times a day to zap them in the meantime.

ETA: I'll make note in the Spam Fighters main thread.

>23 lorannen:

Would it be helpful for us to go easy on some flagging, such as on older profiles? I don't want to make your job any harder this week.

>24 karenb: That's very kind of you to offer! But feel free to proceed with flagging business as usual. The quantity of spam of flags doesn't really slow me down. Flag away!

>23 lorannen: Here's a strange one.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/289943

The user is suspended, but the topic's still there (the subject field is still there, and the rest shows the user as suspended). It wasn't there a while ago, and I wonder if it somehow came back???

>16 Collectorator:

See http://www.librarything.com/topic/289844#6443600

Can we continue to add materials to our collections while this issue continues to be active? I have a growing number of books waiting to be processed, but am hesitating if there is the possibility that those items may not be successfully added.

^Yes, I'm wondering the same. I just got a box today with a handful of books I'd ordered, and I'd really like to get them added... can this be done safely, or must it wait?

>29 GnomonLibrary: and >30 .Monkey.: You can definitely continue cataloging without worry. Just be aware that those newly added items won't show up in Your Books search or Site Search until we turn that index back on.

>31 lorannen: I've been holding off as well. Is it possible that if we add new books we could experience the situation reported, for example, up in >19 anglemark:? Or is that something that only occurred for books entered before the downtime?

>31 lorannen: That's fine, long as they're in the catalog with the proper info I'm good.

>32 harrygbutler: Good question. That is, indeed, something we're only seeing with books added prior to the Great Downtime.

>33 .Monkey.: Yep, info will still be there. I've added a couple books in the last few days myself, and they're absolutely fine.

>34 lorannen: Great. Thank you!

>32 harrygbutler: What >19 anglemark: reported is happening to me to for the same book. I think it's because the work was added or assigned (work combination can cause work numbers to change) during the blackout period last August and anyone adding that book now will get a blank title in their catalog. It should get fixed though when they restore the missing work.

Thanks everyone! Then I will continue to add items as usual. If I see them in "Your Books" when in Admin mode when done, then that's a positive sign that these will display once the search function is back up and running. Is my assumption correct?

>37 GnomonLibrary: Not sure what you mean by "admin mode," but as long as you see them appear on the right hand side of the Add Books page under "recently added," you're all good.

Correct.

Awesome. Sorry for the confusing term; it's what I consider myself when adding books to TinyCat :-)

A few quick replies:

* You can definitely add new data.
* Catalog and site-search is currently backed up and delayed

More generally:

We are making good progress on basically everything, and putting them in new tables ready to go in.

We are quite confident that 100% of the 60k-odd books lost will have 95% of their data.

Our first goal, however, is not that data, but getting all the broken linkages restored. At present if you added a book with the same title as one first added during the 21 hours, you are missing your book title. Some have reported this. We can restore that book title no matter what, but I want to restore the original linkage correctly. The same applies to author name, isbn, edition, etc. This is counter-intuitive, but it's the most secure and safe thing to do.

Tags will going in shortly, as we have completed our processing of that. Update: Done

I think our current process-order is:

1. Broken linkages--book titles, authors, isbns, editions, works, tags.
2. Missing 65k books (6k of them subsequently deleted by users)
3. Re-run all collection moves and/or compare to archived data, and then present users with the option to use what we found or prefer their current situation.
4. Other steps, but I don't have the order down yet.

>1 timspalding: Sorry for all the problems you've had with the data. but thank you for your slow, careful work to preserve data. I appreciate all you do for LT members.

timspalding et al You guys are doing all the right things, in all the right way. Thanks so much for all your hard work, and for communicating. Hope you remember to take breaks etc.

I've been through a major network restore with missing and corrupt data, so I have some small idea of what you all are going through, and I understand how painful, frustrating and time-consuming it can be. Thanks so much to Tim, Kristi, Loranne and everyone else that is working so hard to get this sorted!

Not sure whether this is related to the Big Downtime or not, but today when I checked my "Books Requested/Recieved" page in the Early Reviewer program, it seems to have sprouted two of the Noir by Christopher Moore entries.

>45 MrsLee: That's been reported for a different book here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/289962, so you might want to post there and let lorannen know that more than one book is affected.

>45 MrsLee: Interesting! There was another iteration of this for a different book in, I believe, the same ER batch. I'm pretty sure it's connected to the Great Downtime. Would you mind confirming for me that it's from the December 2017 batch?

This is daunting. There are no books listed under YOUR BOOKS (please note that being totally self-centered, I only care about MY BOOKS) from 2017-06-07 through 2018-03-06.

To compound (my) problem, I've never backed up my LT Files. Gads, how dumb can I be? No. Don't answer.

>48 kaulsu: I am able to see books in your books (that's your "your books" not my "your books") that have been entered between those dates. Catalog search is not functional at the moment so if you are searching for those books that is why you can't find them, not because they are not there.

Tim, would it be possible to put up a yellow banner about catalog search not working? It will prevent people who aren't active on Talk from panicking like kaulsu.

>48 kaulsu:

Make sure you're looking in your "My Library" collection; I see that "Quaker Books" has no books in the date range you mention.

I'm sorry if I'm asking something that's been asked before, I've tried to read through posts but maybe I'm just not getting it... I just checked my catalogue for books entered around the August "gap", and I'm pretty sure one book is missing. (I have a "book diary list" on another site so I know what I read in August 2017, and by comparing the entry dates I was able to sort of pinpoint what should be here).

The book I mean is Jack Campbell's "Taipumaton" (book one of Lost Fleet series, orig.name Dauntless). Most likely entered by ISBN 9789518875393. And I'm using the Finnish site if that's relevant in any way.

So should I maybe just wait - is the lost data coming back at some point?

>52 Talvitar: Correct. We know about the gap, and we'll be able to restore all 'missing' books. Please see Tim's post here for details: https://www.librarything.com/topic/289941#6446814, and thanks for your patience!

^No, thank YOU guys for being so open and communicative about this problem :)

I'll check that post, thanks!

Um... I am not sure if my problem is related to this problem, but in the last few days I've added three books to My Library. They appear on my Home page, and I have gone into my general listing and they are listed. However, when I try to call them up by their tags, they are not listed in those categories. I attempted the listings over several days to see if it cleared up, but it doesn't.

If you can clear this up I would be very grateful. Thanks!

>55 ladyjanegray: Well, technically it's related to the efforts under way to fix this problem rather than the original problem itself, but yes, that's expected. Searching won't currently find entries which are new or changed since indexing was turned off (e.g. see >14 kristilabrie: and >21 lorannen: and >31 lorannen: above, or a few other threads - I know there's a lot to go through here). This includes new books, their tags, and basically every other data element.

Yeah, we're working on getting search restored, but I think it won't be today. It's systems, and we just have too much systems going on right now. Also, it's Friday, a bad time to change things. I'll get a nav-thing up.

>55 ladyjanegray:

Do you see them if you click on a tag, on a book or on https://www.librarything.com/tags/ladyjanegray? If so, everything is fine. But search is not working.

Yes, those work, but the Search does not. Well I hope everything works out. Thanks!

Seconding the notion to please put up a glaring banner about search being down for things, to prevent the continuing and endless stream of help it's not working! posts.

Here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/290066

Oh, btw, the home-page said the import queue was down. It is not. It's going.

Thank you! :)

Has the import queue been shut down again? I submitted 3 ISBN's this afternoon and still haven't seen any results.

>47 lorannen: Sorry for the delay. Yes, both are the December batch.

Any idea when the import options will be up and running?

>66 HandelmanLibraryTINR: We just had to kickstart the import queues again, sorry for the trouble (we had turned them back on last week, but they stopped running). That said, it looks like your two most recent imports (4/11 and 4/13) didn't get added. You may need to submit your import/s once more.

Is search indexing back on?

Oooh! The "search index" message did not display when I logged onto LT. Is this a "sign" that things have been resolved and all is well?

I love that at the beginning of the thread everyone was like 'oh, this and this book are missing, and this and this tag are missing', and I'm sitting there thinking...... my library is such a mess tag/book wise, I could be missing 100s of books and wouldn't know it.... heh.... sincere kudos to all those who have such neat and tidy libraries.

ETA: I'm pretty sure that I'm not actually missing any books, just an example of the chaos of my poor library :))

You are not alone ;-)

Update:

1. The search index is indeed back.
2. Site search is not back.
3. A series of other data has been restored for all or most books. The priority has been on that--on, technically, filling in all the normalizations--not on the 60k "gap" in books. (We're doing that last.) Thus many books that didn't work before now work, because their "works" have been restored. Ditto tags, book titles, author names and editions.
4. Soon—tomorrow?—I'll get on the actual gap.

Thank you Tim, Kristi and Loranne. Just verified that all items added in August display and are discoverable via the search function. THANK YOU!!!

Thanks for the update. I noticed that some stuff is back but not all. My Art Garfunkel book is back as well as Common Knowledge on it. I had to restore the cover. If you look at his list of books, it says missing data. The Common Knowledge on the Wiseman book has not returned. 😿. I will be patient.

>74 Micheller7:

Yes, there are still 60k books missing. We'll start on them tomorrow.

courage, mes amis !
x

Timspalding, Lorraine and all: you guys rock. I hope you realize that this is a big deal.

>70 DanieXJ: and >71 GnomonLibrary:. Mine is a mess as well. In fact I just bought another duplicate about 2 weeks ago. . . spelled the title wrong in the first one when I did a manual entry. . . ah, such is life!

'Zeitgeist', or at least my entry, has not updated in at least two days.

I never got a winner's list for my Member Giveaway that ended a week ago, should I just repost it?

>80 Billy_Wong: I believe they are still dealing with unscheduled downtime issues. Give them a bit of time to finish making sure we're up and running correctly.

>80 Billy_Wong: @gilroy is correct. The Member Giveaway winners selection process is currently paused while developers make sure everything is finished and looking good from the downtime issues. We will post here once the winners are being run again, so you'll know when to expect your profile comment for your giveaway winners' list. Thanks for your patience!

Is there an update?

>83 sturlington: I'll let Tim fill in the details, but we're hoping to get the 60k books retrieved back in by tomorrow. Crons (processes like Member Giveaways and On This Day) will come back on after that point. Thanks for your patience, everyone!

>84 lorannen:
Thanks for the updates!

Thanks for all the work!

Missing books not yet retrieved? What's the latest time estimate?

Monday or Tuesday, I think. Sorry.

Sorry if this was already answered, are the missing books back yet?

They seem not to be back. At least, my missing books have not yet reappeared.
Maybe the actions planned for 'Monday or Tuesday' did not work?
Anyone know for sure?

We'll be sure to post here once the books have been restored—you're correct, they're not back yet, but Tim's working hard on it. Thanks for your patience!

I certainly appreciate all the effort the staff is going to, but it's a little disturbing that it's taking most of a month to restore less than a day's worth of data. I hope that one of the things looked at, once that's dealt with, is recovery strategies so that if an even more serious data loss should occur in the future the recovery could be swifter.

You tread heavily, but you speak the truth. It's mostly time to do the work. I have had to put it on a shelf the first half of this week. I shall attempt to finish it by end of week.

Happy to have an update. I agree with the sentiments of lorax.

It's hard to imagine any issue more important to your business then this.

Tim spaulding, thanks for keeping us posted. You have done a great job with this site. I know you will work this out and it will be all good. Keep up the great work.

I seem to be missing a review from just this time period, which suggests this thread is my explanation. Is there any chance of restoring reviews? (Personally that's much more disappointing to have lost than the existence of the book in my library -- reviews are a lot more work!) I've just gone through and done a backup, too, because I should really truly know better; all complex systems break, even mostly stable ones.

*headdesk*

All data will, at some point, be restored. Of course this includes reviews, why on earth wouldn't it?

(And your backup isn't. It's a local copy. It would only be a backup if you could restore your data from it, which you can't - the LT importer doesn't include most of the fields in the export.)

Well, it's certainly a "backup" in the vernacular sense of the term. And all of its contents could be restored through a tedious manual process.

>99 paradoxosalpha:

Yeah, I know. It's just been a pet cause of mine for years now that they should really fix the importer. (It started back when they went to heroic lengths to let users of other competing sites fully and completely import the export files from *those* sites, when they haven't done anything similar for their own data.)

I was looking up something in a thread of last year and see there are missing posts in August 2017.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/266452
I have links to the posts about books in the second post, and these two are missing:

book 265: Blauw licht (Blue Lightning, Sheltand 4) by Ann Cleeves, 291 pages, TIOLI #19, , msg 103 (= https://www.librarything.com//topic/266452#6143969 )
book 264: De Cock en de dode meesters (De Cock 41) by A.C. Baantjer, 133 pages, TIOLI #3, , msg 102 (= https://www.librarything.com//topic/266452#6143949 )

The Blue Lightning book was missing from my library, I re-entered it before I read the comments here. The other book is still in my library.
It is not a big deal, but thought I should report, as I think it might be related.

Hello hard-working Thingers, >91 kristilabrie:? >93 timspalding:?

I've just discovered that 2 of our books disappeared from our LT catalogue. They were from that 'missing data' time, entered into our collection 2017-08-13, with book IDs 144887540 (With our own eyes; by Don Mosley) & 144891033 (The Pendle Hill reader; ed. Herrymon Maurer).

Very curious - as I when I first learned of that black hole in the data, I did a very thorough combing of our exported entire-collection backup, looking up in LT each of the books entered during that 2017-08-11 through 2017-08-13 period. During the combing the now-missing books were showing as in the collection.

This would have escaped notice, except one of them was on loan during that horrible meltdown, and it has only been returned yesterday - very overdue. When I checked it in, the title didn't come up. And as I looked into the borrower's record it shows another book similarly untitled but 'deleted'. I have no idea what that other book could be, as I'm quite sure the borrower only borrowed 3 books ever.

Should I just hope you get this sorted? Or is there something I should do from my end?

Doncha just love the endless stream of little mysteries?!?!

Blessings,
Bevianne

Thanks for checking in, Bevianne. I would wait until Tim's done with the restoration of the August 2017 data before looking over everything. The process isn't done yet, so you may see some oddities, as described in your post, from here 'til then. We'll be sure to post here with updates, thanks for your patience!

Is there a rough estimate when the restoration will be done? It's been about a month.

How can it possibly be made clearer that this is still ongoing and that they do not need individual reports of each and every missing title or missing/outdated information on affected titles?

There is no "endless stream of little mysteries". There is one large, very well-understood issue. And yet, some people insist that their issue is special, more important, more complicated, and demands immediate and personalized attention.

I understand it's been slow and the associated frustration, but I don't understand why people think saying "but MY data is still missing TOO" is going to accomplish anything.

Tim,
I haven't had much time, but just now thought of a way to pinpoint my collection. It seems that out of the 29 books I have read this year, only 4 Pendle Hill Pamphlets have made it through the crisis.

I will try to reconstruct, and to see if the work pages still exist. I hope all is fixed now.

Can't believe you don't back-up your server (says the dodo who doesnt back up her laptop...)

:D
Susan

>106 kaulsu: Thanks for your patience. There's no need to reconstruct data here. We have it, and we know where it is. As Tim mentioned in >41 timspalding:, it's a matter of making sure all linkages within LT have been restored, which is a tedious process.

Does this help? My tags page says I read 4 books in 2018...(the 4 Pendle Hill Pamphlets mentioned in post #106), but the "Your Tags" on the Home Page says I have 29 books marked 2018.

Also, Someone evidently found one that I read in early 2018 and "recently added" it to April 11. So I have hope and confidence.

Thank you for this impossible task everyone at LT is doing!! I felt bereft there for a couple of days!! You are all the best!

Okay, the books will be coming in tonight and tomorrow morning. Shortly after going in for your account you will also get an email about it.

Awesome.

Yesssssss, I love you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Snort. Well. Not quite. It's 2:50 and I'm not done enough to run it. Tomorrow, I've got too much going on to run it and make sure it worked. So we're looking at a 24 delay.

>112 timspalding: So, love is patient?

>70 DanieXJ: LOL me too. I thought surely LibraryThing would put an end to the infuriating practice of me buying a book I'm sure I don't have, bringing it home and immediately finding another copy. Or more than one. Nope! (I understand some people avoid this by checking their LT on their phones in the store. I don't have a phone. All blame to me, not LT!)

At the moment it seems like search is down. Is this expected as part of the still not finished recovery process or something new?

If it was expecetd as part of the recovery process, communication could have been better.

>115 chwiggy: No, this was not expected—site search seemed to be having issues since last night, but @ccatalfo has since fixed it. Thanks for your patience.

Books are going in at a rate of about 1/second. There are some 50k of them to go. So, 13 hours. (Gah!)

I'll post more soon, and send out an email to everyone when it's done, with details. But you'll note the books lack ratings. They will be coming in post-hoc. "From where" is also missing, and will come later. All books are also entered into a "Recovered books" collection.

I've gotten 2 out of 5 back so far. Covers have reverted (they're not the ones I uploaded), and acquired date is missing as well.

Oddly, if I sort my library by Entry Date, they show up as newest even though they show a date of 8/12/2017.

I see my first one; they're appearing at the top of my Recently Added module, albeit with date "August 2017."

Was there an announcement somewhere that this was going to happen? I was not even aware that any books had gone missing, until they started showing up as recently added. I started a bug report, which was closed and I was directed here. (No problem with that, and thanks Amanda. It's just that it was only when I got to here that I understood what was happening.)

BTW, thanks for the diligent work by all LTers on the recovery from that peculiar event.

Bill

>117 timspalding:
Will the problem of books appearing in the wrong order (albeit with the right date) be corrected? One I didn't even realize was missing just reappeared. However, so far only some common knowledge has been added back, but not all. Is that still ongoing if the book is back? One book is missing the date read. I can add it back, but will wait until the process is over because may be that will pop up during the process.
Where will we find the "recovered books collection"?

Micheller7: Check your Profile page: Thats where the "Recovered books" collection is found. When you have edited it and want to move it back, just change the collection in the edit work mode. I'm waiting to do that for a bit, to see what gets repaired in terms of addition information etc.

Still adding. Going to bed.

Sleep well!

The comments field is restored as a single block of text - all the line breaks have been stripped out (html markup did make it back). From my perspective, this isn’t worth spending staff time to correct, but then I have only two entries to fix.

>121 Micheller7: Where will we find the "recovered books collection"?
It's the last entry in the Select Collection pulldown list on the Your Books page. And, if you display the Collections column on that page, it’s there.

>125 civitas: Nice catch. I hadn't noticed it. Line breaks are not stripped out, but rather replaced with a space character.
I think the same thing happened to the Review field.

I also think the volumes field is a goner, like ratings (but they are just late in arrival (>117 timspalding:)), and reading dates.
I'm not sure I had dimensions and weight on my two restored books, but they are blank now anyway.

So the restore is not flawless, but acceptable. Thanks Tim!

Okay, here's the post:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/291217

>126 bnielsen:

Yes. You nailed it. We have a lot of the format data, but I'm not sure I can match it up perfectly. I'm going to look at it more later.

>127 timspalding: Thanks. I've taken a look at an old copy of my data and reentered Volumes, Reading dates, H x L x W, Weight and Pages and restored my linebreaks in Review and Comments. I've also uploaded the cover again. There might be something else missing, but if so I didn't notice it.

Okay, ratings have been recovered for all books that had ratings. They are going in now. It also includes ratings made during this period on other books (which weren't subsequently overridden later). Will be finished in 10m.

I don’t have any experience with version control etc, but I’m interested in your process of solving conflicts between the old and the new data.

Still missing books, is this still a work in progress or has it been completed. Thank You!

>132 robschloemer:
You may want to talk about missing books on this thread over here:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/291217

>132 robschloemer:

It's complete. The gap did not contain any books of yours. What do you think you are missing?

Entry dates for users who signed up during the gap have been recovered and assigned.

Tim,Origainally my total collection was over 2000 around the time of this event.. Then I logged in and it had fallen below 2000 to about 1960 or so. Not sure exactly. I figured the drop was due to the issues you were having. Not sure what else it could fo been? Thoughts and thank you for the time.

Hi Tim,
I am not missing a “smattering” of books. For example, I am missing every book, except 1, of books I have received through LTER (the tag I use for LibraryThing Eatly Readers (Early Reviewers?).

I have completed reading 35 books so far in 2018. When I go to the actual tags page, only 4 are listed.

I understand my collection may never again be whole, but I’d like to know if you think there is anyway to recover my lost data? And if you still think you only lost data from s few days.

It is next to impossible for me to remember all the books I have read. I cannot remember the names of my people friends (of which I have many fewer than my book friends!). The books tagged with LTER seem easier to figure out. Or it seems to me would be easier for you to figure out. Their work pages are gone for me.

Not complaining, because I understand the nature of crashes...but just wishing to help, if there is any help to be given....
Susan

>138 kaulsu:

I'm seeing 83 books with the LTER tag in your catalog: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/kaulsu&tag=LTER And one tagged "LTER oops"?

>49 norabelle414: Norabelle414, Thanks! I haven’t been too interested in LT recently because I really thought I had all these books missing. Not that I actually understand the problem, but I will remain calm.

>57 timspalding: TimSpalding, ignore my >104 AndreasJ: reply. I will remain patient!

>138 kaulsu: I see 35 books in your catalog tagged as "2018". Is it possible you are only looking at one collection and not "all collections"?

>138 kaulsu: You are looking at your Quaker Books collection, not Your Books or All Collections.

BTW, this is a very easy mistake to make, and one of the more common bug report issues. I know I have panicked several times before calming myself down and looking at the settings again.

>138 kaulsu:

Do you understand the point they're making? Your books are there. Are you good now?

Note that no books were lost except ones added during this very short period, and all those were recovered.

Hi Tim
Some how my recently added duplicates are not reflected when i do a search both in admin mode and in the catalog. I can see it under Your Books cos i list the titles by entry date. Is it because there is still work being done on the backend? Somehow the problem does not occur on newly added unique titles. Thanks for your advice (PS: We have hit more than 8,000 titles so could it be that we've maxed our limit?) Bonny

>144 SAIGONSTAR: This topic has to do with problems related to the April downtime. Other problems should be handled separately.

If you are having issues, you need to specify the books involved or they can't be be checked on.