Dear readers, commentators, forum posters, and community members in general,
I am taking a vacation for an undecided period of time. The degree of vacation is also undecided, in that I expect to not completely avoid this website and others like it.
What happened?
In November 2015, I moved the blog and forum from a shared server to a private server. I did this for a number of reasons, none of which really matter here.
In 2014 or so, I had a data-loss scare. Nothing was lost but in a moment of clarity, I set up rigorous back-up procedures with daily off-site back-ups.
Apparently, those procedures were not copied over to the server. Since November 2015, no back-ups were made.
On the 28th of May, I noticed that the website was not loading. I logged in to the server only to find that the file system was in a read-only state. After further study, I found that the file system had been corrupted.
Here is a bunch of technical details few of you will find interesting.
This site uses WordPress and MySQL as database, using InnoDB as storage engine. Lots of website use this exact structure and it’s fine. In fact, it’s rock solid. Provided you have a back-up procedure.
The corrupt file system prevented the site from loading and dumping the database was not working. After fixing the file system corruption, the sites loaded temporarily but soon came crashing down again.
I’m still sorting out what happened but so far, it seem as if the InnoDB files or index on the file system were lost when the file system was fixed.
While I still have all the files, piecing them together without an index is nearly impossible with InnoDB.
Technical details end.
The data isn’t lost and I might be able to restore data at some point in the future.
What happens now?
The website will be back. The forum will come back in a couple of days has already come back (starting from scratch) and when my indeterminate vacation is over, so will the posts.
I have a lot going on right now and it’s been affecting the quality of the posts, I feel. Many of them were rushed hours before being published, instead of being more thoroughly planned out and written ahead of schedule.
I will take this time to consider the future of STREBER Weekly. I have been generally happy with how the format has been lately but maybe this time off will give some perspective.
From a technical point of view, this new site (also using WordPress) is hosted on a different server with daily back-ups already in place. Next step is to set up a real-time slave of the database.
And if I cannot recover the data from the old database, I will simply have to re-write those lost articles. To me, that’s not such a terrible thing. Some of the earlier articles were poorly written; I’m a better blogger now than in 2014 and 2015.
I had any way almost reached the end of the Jurisdiction Spotlight series and was going to start re-writing articles, both for the sake of quality and also to have more up-to-date information.
What can readers do?
Some of you have already reached out and offered technical assistance. While this is very kind and thoughtful of you, I must decline any such offer.
In looking through the individual database files, I noticed that many of you were messaging with each other using the forum’s private messaging functionality. I simply cannot risk anyone seeing those messages. Even I don’t want to read them.
For now, all you can do to help is to check back in a few days when the forums should be up and running again. Forums are back online using bbPress, meaning one log-in will cover both blog comments and forum posts again.
Most of all, please know that I appreciate each and every one of you. Every comment and forum post, I feel, goes towards a more informed public about offshore banking, international financial services, and cross-border incorporation services and structures.
Take care and be well!
Streber
Long time reader, never signed up to post. Not my thing.
Had to join just to let you know this site is of GREAT value and hope you decide to continue it. You were doing a great job, best online offshore resource site by FAR.
MASSIVE… MASSIVE LOSS of info & resources.
Good luck and take care.
VK
Thanks, VK!
I think we’re going to be able to restore most of the blog posts.
Hi Vadim 🙂
Just great ! All the 2016 articles about the alternate Financial Companies flowering everywhere ( LeuPay, etc… ) were just NECESSARY….
I had saved also some Juridictions / banking articles, but not a LARGE quantity of stuff, compared to yours, i guess.
So, VERY GRATEFUL for permitting to Sir STREBER the FULL / or near perfect RESTAURATION of this excellent website.
Best regards
B
Dear Streber,
As I know the Internet is a fickle thing, I did save all your newer posts, week after week, although I never commented.
Thus I have the complete archive of Streber posts since November 2015–from “Behind The Scenes at a Bank” to “Jurisdiction Spotlight: Luxembourg”.
(Anyway, a lot of them should simply be in Google’s cache, but that won’t last too long.)
Tell me if that would help you, and I’d post the desired pages at your convenience.
V.
Dear Vadim,
That’s great news! I will send you an email.
Streber
Hey Streber,
You can find a cached version of your old site here in case you need to get some blog posts from there: https://web.archive.org/web/20150719052846/https://www.streber.org/
You can check here in archive.org if you need more details on your site.
You should also change WP comments for Disqus or something which comes easier for commentators that don’t want to register.
Your information is really good and I like it. I hope you can recover the site. I would recommend using a Hosting such as WP Engine to avoid issues in the future.
Enjoy your vacations!
Thanks! I’ll set some time aside to repopulate old articles form the various caches out there. Looks like most of them can be recovered.
I’ve evaluated Disqus in the past but decided against it on privacy grounds. It is (or at least was?) possible, even for regular visitors, to track commentators across websites. Since what we discuss here is often of a sensitive nature – even if no in-depth details are shared – this could have undesired side-effects. Many visitors also use privacy-enhancing browser plugins, most of which block Disqus.
As of now, the new forum is interconnected with WordPress. One login works for both systems. There were far more forum posts than blog comments, so keeping it all WP seems like a solid choice in this case.
This is quite saddening but we totally understand and wish you the best of luck. We hope to get you can reconstitute everything so you don’t have to rewrite all of it. Godspeed and hope to hear from you again soon.
Thanks for the support, mattoy!
That sucks! I admire the time you take to put in to this great non-profit resource. So it would be a pity if everything is lost. Even if you don’t mind writing the articles again.
I don’t know if I can be of any help. But I think you should check out cached versions of your blog.
I just checked the go-to place for cached versions: archive.org, but wasn’t able to find recent articles.
When I tried http://cachedview.com I was able to find a lot more recent pages. When going to a cached version of https://streber.st I was able to view the full homepage. But after clicking an article it didn’t work. If you copy the link and put that new link back in cachedview.com it’s visible.
Streber.st: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.streber.org/
What’s up in Myanmar?: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.streber.org/2016/05/whats-up-in-myanmar/
Thanks, balboni!
I hadn’t thought about using caching websites to repopulate articles. It’s definitely a possibility for articles posted since November 2015 (older articles are backed up).