2008 Server Crash
-
For those who aren't aware, back in 2008 TPT had a server crash that wiped all of the saves. As far as I know, nothing similar has happened since. However, I wanted to know. Is there any chance this or something similar could happen again? Is there any form of protection against this, such as a backup server? With all of the progress TPT has made since 2008, I am very concerned.
-
@FoxFries404 (View Post)
The crash was later than 2008, but that was due to Skylark moving onto other priorities in life.
That is very unlikely to happen again since the current team is staffed multiple people (instead of just one person). The server is backed up regularly as far as I can tell. In regards to the saves "lost" they weren't lost and are currently hosted on a replica server by @jacksonmj (https://powdertoythings.co.uk/OldPowder/)Edited once by Sylvi. Last: 29th Dec 2025 -
@Sylvi (View Post), Is there at least 1 lost save after the crash? Also, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
-
@LogikDOS (View Post)
There were no version numbers back then. They were not numbered initially for a while and there was no such thing as an actual one numbered as version 3.
Probably because most people who play the game now weren't around to know exactly what happened at the time and did not get impacted by the server shutdown.Edited once by Sylvi. Last: 5th February -
I've never had a clear picture in my head in how the server transitioned. Everything was lost sure, but that might not have been unintentional. Skylark may have intentionally shut down the servers. At some point either before or after this, he set up a transition plan with Simon, and Simon created a new server from scratch.
-
@jacob1 (View Post)
It was a slow decay of service. Things just started to fail (slow connection, unreliable opening of saves) and one day *boop* couldn't connect. As far as I'm aware Simon reached out to Skylark for the game's source code after the whole thing shutdown and created a new server from scratch because he was aware of the game being licensed under GPLv3
I was there for the whole slow decay and shutdown. Then also a bit after the start of here (when Conversations and official moderation didn't initially exist on this server either), at some point I did learn how this setup started. Forgot the context of how I got that story from SimonEdited once by Sylvi. Last: 5th February -
@Sylvi (View Post)
I see, cool insights into an ancient time. You had a lot more opportunity to ask Simon things like that than I did. -
My saves from 16 years ago are still alive and well, so I am going to go ahead and say that things aren't going to randomly get deleted any time soon.
I wasn't around during the OG times, but I do remember the new saves browser getting built out by Simon way back when. I don't remember it ever going down, not even for maintenance.
-
I never actually played the game while the original servers were up. I actually got the game source code from a third party (I can't remember) somewhere around May/June 2010. There was no server code and I wrote a compatible server by looking at the game code.
There have been at least two incidents since then, somewhere between 2010 and early 2012:
- An accident where I deleted every save title and had to recover them from logs. If you see any saves called "[no title]"... that is why.
- At some point, one of the mechanical hard disks died. It took a day or so to recover as there were no backups; the drive controller would crash when reading bad sectors and so everything had to be pieced together. While no saves were lost, there were some in-development changes to the Groups/Forum software that were badly corrupted. As this inconveniently happened after I'd formatted my development machine, I had no way of recovering this, and never got the motivation to re-do it all. This is why the groups forum was so buggy.
