As some of you may have already seen via my post on April 3rd, we are in the process of moving all of our images to new hardware. The new system was put in place after reviewing companies that do nothing but image hosting. We feel confident that the new image hosting system will be much more reliable, give us an almost infinate amount of room to grow, and take care of the backup of images.
We are doing our best to make sure the migration from the old hardware to the new goes as smoothly as possible and users have 0 downtime of their images hosted with Auctiva.
This past weekend we had an exception to this goal of 0 downtime. One small range of our users (2%) had their images purged after we thought the transition of images had completed successfully. This was a gross oversight on our end for assuming the transition completed without errors. This happened Saturday evening, around 5pm PST.
On Sunday morning, we restored all images that were uploaded over the past 2.5 weeks for the affected users. The majority of listings posted with Auctiva have images uploaded during the auction creation time and being able to immediately restore the 2.5 weeks of recently uploaded images will have resolved the problem for the majority of affected users. Unfortunately, this does not help those of you with older store items or relisted items.
We have all images uploaded during the last 2 months for all of these users on a backup drive and are currently copying those images over.
We have 100% of the images for some of the affected users on the backup drive and as we sync the backup images, these images will be copied over as well.
By the end of day today, we will have restored all the images we possibly can. Restoring is happening as of this very minute, so some users will already have their images back.
I deeply appologize for the loss of images to our customers. We look to regain your trust in our image hosting as soon as we complete the transition of images. I know it won't come easy, but I do hope to someday read these message boards and not have to see any reports of missing auction images.
Kevin Kinell
VP Engineering
Auctiva Corporation