Finale Forum

I reported this issue in the Forum Feedback spot, but I don't think many users read that, so I'm giving a warning here.

All my Forum posts with Finale File attachments from September 17 and back to the date I joined have disappeared. Gone. I only mention it here for those of you who have given help to others or who have posted files for examination and may have attached files to check for your posts before September 17 to see if your attachments have also vanished. If I am the only one, then I will try to contact the moderators about the issue. However, if I am not the only one, we all need to at least be aware of the problem.

It appears not to affect picture attachments, or links appearing in the body of a post.

Zuill

I am affected too, as you know. I think the more we can characterize who and when, the better, since I suspect this was not intentionally done but rather is some sort of glitch. I will try to look more closely later today and provide more detail.

I updated my reporting on the issue in the original topic I started.

viewtopic.php?f=10&p=79244#p79244

Zuill

I just heard from Admin. He didn’t do anything. Since only some attachments are gone, he wonders if it’s a targeted attack. I’ve changed my password, and Peter should do so, as well.

More details will follow, if there is anything to report.

miker,

Thank you for the report. I hope things get resolved.

Zuill

He just suggested that maybe there is a flaw in the Edit function. Could the attachments be dropped after editing the post?

Motet reported this issue yesterday. There is no automatic removal of attachments by age or any other metric. We don't randomly or automatically prune the forum. The only thing that gets pruned are spam and inactive users.

So far we can find no evidence of a hack but we've asked the moderators to change their passwords as a precaution.

By all indications it seems the reported missing attachments were posted between July 27 and September 17 and not all attachments went missing. We're looking into it, but I'm not hopeful we will be able to restore the attachments. Please repost them if you can.

Sorry about this. It could very well be a bug in the forum software.

Thanks!

I just had a thought--there was an odd thing I experienced recently and mentioned: when making a posting and adding attachments, changing your mind and pressing the "Delete" button on an attachment didn't appear to work, and a couple of times I had to bail and start over. I think Zuill mentioned it happened to him, too. This now makes me wonder if the forum software got confused and deleted the the wrong attachment, from an unrelated posting, or corrupted my attachments in general.

Zuill and I have both made a lot of postings here. I wonder if some internal counter or such rolled over. It would be interesting to know if Peter, Mike, and other frequent contributors are having trouble.

I don't think that's it. I think it's more likely that if you edited a post that already had an attachment, there may be a bug in the forum software that doesn't grab all the attachments when you save the edit. We're still looking into it.

All my attachments that are Finale files are gone from September 17 back to my joining the forum. Also, some posts from other users I see at least has the text of the file name, but no link to a file. Possibly those were chosen to be inline, whereas I don't use that option. This is extremely odd.

What I will do is try to go forward and hope this does not continue to happen. However the power of this forum is definitely damaged if people search for help, read in a post that there is a sample file to look at, and then wonder why there's no file. That makes the concept of searching for help greatly reduced, if not useless.

Zuill

For what it's worth, in the pinned "Motet's transposition chart", I made postings with attachments Sun Sep 23, 2018 2:42 pm and Thu Nov 15, 2018 11:32 pm that are now gone. The postings are still there and there's no indication that the posts have been edited (and I'm fairly certain they weren't).

It only seems to affect Finale files. At one time, Finale files were not able to be posted here. We asked for that and got it. I'm thinking that option got removed, maybe accidentally, and in the process, deleted all the files.

Zuill

The "Motet's transposition chart" attachments that disappeared were zipped PDFs.

That's good to know. It looks like picture files remained.

Zuill

zuill wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 15, 2020 1:07 am

… It looks like picture files remained …

Neither the attached Finale document (= Bracket.musx) nor the attached graphic (= Bracket.jpg) remained in this post of mine:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=19376&p=78513#p78513

It seems that it is not just Finale documents, that are missing.
Other files have disappeared as well.

I opened Peter's link above and found that my attached png image(s) in that thread were gone too.

If it's of any help it looked like when you quote a post containing an image - in the qoute you only see the name and format of the image (fx RNA...PNG)

Okay. Then maybe my suggestion that regular, as opposed to inline, attachments are the ones that have been removed. I believe I have only tested inline once, and I don't recall when that post would have been made in order to check it.

Zuill

I always use inline placement of attachments, and mine were gone as well.

Just a perhaps not too qualified guess: Could there have been a crash of the system of this forum, and what remained to be salvaged were backup copies? There is that similarity between quoting, which is a kind of copying, and what is left in the posts (as I mentioned above).

I learned something this morning in communication with the Forum administrator that I was not aware of. I'm probably the only one that didn't know this, but, in case there might be another one out there, all of my attachments are listed in a tab in my User Control Panel. I suppose I should spend more time there to see what else I am not aware of.

Zuill

We finally figured out what happened to the attachments. There was no hack, no passwords were compromised, and the site is stable.

The server company upgraded the database servers and moved the database to new hardware without telling us. Unfortunately, the attachments database was corrupted and they did not notify us. They "repaired" the database but the result is we lost some of the attachments.

Had they let us know, we could have restored from backup. Unfortunately, we didn't find out until 30 days later which exceeds the time of our daily backups. I'm araid there is no way to recover the attachments in the database.

This is unacceptable behavior by the server company and we have raised it with them. We should have been notified before the move and definitely should have been notified the database was corrupt. We have daily backups but we don't save them after 30 days because on a forum a 30 day old backup is irrelevant.

I'm sorry to have to report this but it seems to be a weird one off event caused by poor service by the host. It had nothing to do with a forum software bug or a hack.

Thank you for the update. For our information, did it just affect a certain date range? Or is this an unknown?

Zuill

Thanks, Scott. I bet that also explains sometimes being unable to delete an attachment while composing a new post.

We were able to do a partial restore from a backup on 9/1/2020 and merge it with the new attachments since September 17, 2020.

Please check your attachments and see if some missing ones turned up. I noticed some seem to be back (Motet's transposition chart) but others are still missing (Peter Thomsen's bracket.musx).

If you go to this this link you should be able to see if some your attachments are back:
ucp.php?i=ucp_attachments&mode=attachments

We restored an additional 2498 attachments. Some are still missing but that is a sizable number that I'm glad we were able to retrieve. Unfortunately, this is the best we can do. I'm sorry it took several days to track it down but when the host is less than forthcoming it's a real challenge.

Thanks for the work. For what's it worth, here's my list of still missing attachments in the style of "[posting URL] : [missing attachment URL]"

viewtopic.php?t=17727&p=67379#p67379 : download/file.php?id=6326
viewtopic.php?t=18822&p=74605#p74605 : download/file.php?id=7723
viewtopic.php?t=17335&p=65282#p65282 : download/file.php?id=5957
viewtopic.php?t=17890&p=68375#p68375 : download/file.php?id=6478
viewtopic.php?t=18652&p=73601#p73601 : download/file.php?id=7413
viewtopic.php?t=16396&p=59327#p59327 : download/file.php?id=5059
viewtopic.php?t=18209&p=70802#p70802 : download/file.php?id=6863
viewtopic.php?t=18035&p=69445#p69445 : download/file.php?id=6637
viewtopic.php?t=18035&p=69445#p69445 : download/file.php?id=6638

If I can revocer these by myself, please give a hint how to do so.