Sorry you lost your data, but you had it coming. Any data can be lost or corrupted, that's why a back-up copy is critical. Any freshman CS student knows this, but sadly the UDK like so many of the other services and activities at KU are no longer in the control of the students.

The Journal-World is a fine publication, but they should not be administering the UDK website. With the dirt cheap nature of IT hardware it is an absolute shame that the UDK does not provide KU students the opportunity to learn from silly mistakes like this one. The UDK could return to what it should be, an entirely student driven publication, by running its own servers administered by the students.

Come on students, take back your UDK, the Kansas Athletics website, the KU Marching Band (I despise canned music at football games), and all the other activities and publications that have been stripped from your control.

Haven't you guys ever heard of backups? No backing up data is like not owning any insurance...you are courting disaster.

You've probably learned your lesson now, but rather then crying over spilled milk and lost archives, what have you done to make sure it won't happen again? KU is an educational institution, so I would expect that classes in media and technology include a section on backing up? They ought to now, at least.

jhoxrox -

You're absolutely right. Any Freshman CS student does know this - which is why it was such a surprise to us when we learned our host hadn't been backing up our media, templates, and database.

We work with the World Company because of their top-notch content management system (certainly the best I've ever seen) and reliable customer service. We've had a rather difficult time keeping students around consistently to maintain and grow our products, so it's nice to have dependability from an outside source.

In fact we're currently looking for someone to take the kansan.com / hawkchalk.com / kansantrivia.com reigns from me in May when I (mostly) move on to the real world. Know anyone who can design, write XHTML/CSS, and program Python?

"...so it's nice to have dependability from an outside source."

Yeah, they were sure dependable about backups.

Seriously, what a joke!

Did they even apologize to you?

My understanding is that they feel rather bad for what happened. Their staff was very helpful in getting up and running again.

My role has not been to worry about culpability (I leave that to the higher-ups) but to focus on getting kansan.com running again.

The situation sucks. The last thing I wanted to do was spend my week digging through templates and rebuilding files, and I'm sure the last thing the staff at World Company wanted to do was dig through a corrupted hard drive to recover all these files.

I'd like to repeat my request for pages you encounter that don't work the way they should. I can only stumble upon so many errors myself.

Might I suggest SpinRite on the hard drive. You might be able to salvage the data. http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm I'm not the owner of the website but I'm a listener of his podcast and it would be the first place I go to try and get data off of a dead HD. Let me know if it works!

The basketball posters are not working currently.

What a lousy thing to have happen - its tough to have to count on outside sources for things like data backup, but on the other hand, there definitely isn't enough continuity and reliability among J-School students to count on them for something as complex as server/data management. Hope the UDK is good to go for a while.

rohdek -

Thanks for the reminder. I'll get as many of the posters back up as possible.

Welcome back thebomb.com! My life was in shambles with out you. What a catastrophe. Berg, you are truly fabulous!!

Wow. As a former Kansan staffer, this really saddens me. Considering the lack of interest most people have in taking the time to track down physical copies, the Kansan's reporting up until now is as good as gone. Is retyping the stories from hard copies the only option? Because if so, those stories will never appear online again.

(By the way, the Contacts page still needs some reformatting...)

hey Ryan, the "advertise" link doesn't work.

Two words: amateur hour

stagehwk -

We just got some basic functionality back at kansan.com/advertise/ with links to PDFs of our rate card and media kit. It'll have to do for now. Thanks for the reminder.

WOW! So glad you got your rate card back online! Who would want to advertise on a blank site with little to no content? Not trying to flame but get the !@#$ archives back. The site use to go back as far as 1997 then you guys upgraded to some new CMS and none of the old data was imported back in. Do you need to hire a real database admin? I think so!

I have a few things to say. As a former Kansan staffer, (addie and newsie, but seriously go addies!)I am sorry for your loss but commend you on your hard work to get it back up and running. Outside people do not understand that Kansan staffers, while the best student newspaper in the nation, are still students. Students graduate and move on and it is important to have the stability of an outside source when new future world journalists come in to take the reigns. My only complaint is that while the site was down you misspelled the word maintenance on the default page... seriously newsies?!

TexasJayhawk -

The server maintenance page was put up by a staff member at World-Online, not our news staff. As soon as the error was pointed out to me, I contacted World-Online and the error was fixed promptly. It's also regrettable that the content of the initial error message stated that the server was down for maintenance rather than explaining anything about the hard drive failure. Once I was reliably connected to the server a few days later, I was sure to change the message to more accurately reflect the situation.

Fark -

We've had many requests to get that information back online, as those PDFs are a bit too large to email reliably. We're working on recovering everything we possibly can, while also developing some new stuff, so resources here are stretched a bit thinner than we'd prefer. But hey, the site's back up and running in a damn near normal fashion. That's the most important step.

@kody is right. Ryan, listen to Security Now episode 81 titled "Hard Drive Reliability" and catch a clue. Yes this could be considered a flame but it is well deserved. A done of data and hard work was lost. It would be one thing if it was your personal site but this was the blood of the hard-working staff that was drained.

The switch to the Django/Ellington CMS was a mistake. Stop being a fanboy and look at what happened. "Best CMS?" Hardly! Have you even used anything else before? I sure hope the Kansan did not pay $15k for this POS. There are plenty of free CMS' that exist. Why would you willingly be under The World Online monopoly? Sounds like they could care less about the Kansan. I have never heard of any of there sites go down and for sure never lost an entire site.

Here are a few things to consider: 1. Get a real CMS that you know and understand. Drupal, Joomla!? Textpattern? Wordpress? Not all of them meet your corporate needs but the first few do.

Sites that run Drupal: SpreadFirefox.com, TheOnion.com, MTV.co.uk, TWIT.tv...

1. Get a real host. Why would you ever want to host your site at the ISP level? The only reason to do this would be if you can personally service the box. Did LJ give you this access? If not, move on! If so, you should have backup tapes for every day.

2. Hire a designer that knows about browser bugs and then design for the most popular browsers. (Hint: It's not Safari or IE for Mac!)

If I sound a little edgy it's because I use to work for my beloved Kansan and now none of my articles are on the site. Please find a way to recover the archives.

~james

James -

You act as if we're not a great deal upset over the mismanagement of our data. I assure you, we are. But it's not my role to dwell on that fact. It's my roll to say "sh*t happened (damn profanity filter)" and find the best way move our site forward.

As a matter of fact, I have used other CMSs before. Good luck getting the CMS products you listed to do out of the box what we need a newspaper CMS to do. They require heavy customization. Consider me quite experienced with WordPress and mildly with Joomla. Scripps online newspaper division is in the process of switching over their entire portfolio of newspaper sites to Ellington (http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006...). I've seen the product they are switching from, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more to implement than Elligton, and can say with confidence that Ellington is a fantastic CMS, and allows us to focus on content, not technology.

As for designing for the most popular browser, I have to strongly disagree with you. Web sites are designed to a set of standards, which Firefox and Safari both follow quite closely, and then consideration is given for the browsers that have lost their way (Microsoft, I'm looking at you). At launch of the new site, I know I was down to only a single IE6 bug on the front page. I do not currently have access to IE7 for further testing. If you wouldn't mind, I'd be greatly appreciative if you could take a few screenshots of what's breaking for you on IE. I assure you I don't want those browser bugs there any more than you do.

Seems like this discussion has turned from a polite explanation of what occured to personal attacks. Let me be the first to try and reshape it...

Losing years worth of content is very, very unfortunate and really shouldn't happen. But, let's stop the blame game and focus on trying to help current staffers in identifying problems and solving them.

1) Ryan, what you have done to the look and feel of the Kansan online is really something to be proud of. The site is clean, functional, and really matches the goals I remember you discussing back when I worked there.

2) I'd love to see the original content come back to the site. But if it's not possible to recover the data, then so be it. This is a college newspaper website, not The New York Times.

3) Moving forward from this requires examining what went wrong with the current situation and seems to boil down this... backup the data more often.

Anyway, enough rambling. Good luck getting the site back to where it was before the crash - I have plenty of faith in your ability to do so.

Okay, so i agree with kbaxter's sentiment...BUT, as a KU grad this sucks on many levels. As most KU students would agree, I read (and still read) the Kansas everyday...and the fact that YEARS of content was lost makes me seriously wonder about the management of The Kansan. My concern beyond the restoration of the site is to identify what caused such a visible representation of the school that I love to make a mistake that makes the entire organization look like it's run by people with no common sense. I mean come on, who doesn't back up their database? Or more to the point, who doesn't make dam sure that the company who provides support for your server is backing up your data?

This mistake doesn't just reflect poorly on your host...as an outsider looking at this situation isn't going to say "man their host sucks"...they are going to laugh The Kansan staff.

Have you worked with the Journal World to determine if the failed drive can be partially recovered or scoped? If you're willing to pay a little, lost data can often be reconstructed. I think the journalism dept owes this to those students whose work has been lost, not to mention the readership.

tjtankar,

After contacting an outside database recovery firm, the J-W informed us the data is likely unrecoverable. We are looking at our options for getting data out of archived PDFs and whatnot.

Also a reminder that the Kansan is independent from The University of Kansas, and while we work with the j-school, we are a separate entity.

The way I see it, the most important news to put online is today's. And we're back to doing that every day, and building a new history of what goes on here at KU.

Can't you pull a lot of material from what archive.org has cached?

Many students use their online articles to send in internship emails, and as a digital portfolio. Are you guys still working to get the information back from 2005?

I commend Ryan and the rest of the current staff on how they handled this situation. It was a catastrophic failure -- that instead of dwelling on and pointing fingers, they worked hard to correct as quickly as possible.

Thank you for all of your hard work these last few years. Kansan.com would not have ANYTHING to complain about losing without all of this. I still believe its the best college site in the country.

To jhoxrox -- the people that work for the Kansan are not only full-time students but journalists and account executives, NOT IT managers. They have more important things to focus on than administering servers. This is why it is outsourced by supposed professionals.

"Take back the UDK" is the most ridiculous statement I have ever heard! The students have 100% control of all editorial and advertising decisions that take place from day to day, from month to month, year in, year out. It's not only in the culture, but in the charter itself.

Good luck to all the staffers (especially those that are graduating) as they close out yet another successful semester.

Having been the web admin for my college newspaper (the Daily Iowan, University of Iowa), I find this entire episode to be ridiculous. We ran our own servers in-house, backed up our own archives in-house. Our systems crashed, we rebuilt. This only shows how second-rate the World Communications company really is. If this happened in the 'real world' heads would roll. People would get fired, contracts would get destroyed, and business would be lost. And it does sound like the Kansan really doesn't care. Really... years of archives are gone, and all that you are saying is 'stuff happens.' That shows lack of enthusiasm and empathy toward your customer. Horrible customer service on your end. The fault lies with the LJ World and that service they provide, and not backing up their systems. But it doesn't seem like the Kansan is doing much, other than saying, 'oh well.'

Spades -

As the guy who had to spend countless hours digging through unnamed files to recover the templates that make this site tick, believe me when I say that I care

And when I say as the representative of the advertising staff that turned Kansan.com into a profitable entity for the first time in its history, who now is faced with the tragedy that all of our archive traffic is gone, meaning our ad inventory is currently sold out, believe me when I say that we care

Our public face has been one of calm, reasonable, no need to panic optimism. Because that is the most productive way to carry ourselves as we move forward with our readership to rebuild the site.

It's not my place to speak of the contracts we hold with World Online. But I assure you our situation with them has been critically examined in search of the best way to move forward.

I consider Kansan.com to be my child that I've been raising for the last two to three years. I'm as insulted when you state that we don't care as I am insulted that our data was not treated respectfully and protected by our host.

As for our archives: we are still working on recovery. One poster above mentioned archive.org, but they don't collect many individual story pages. Our best chance is recovery via Google's cache. The Kansan is currently exploring several options related to this. I hope to see some progress soon, but it's out of my hands (as of last week, I am no longer officially with the Kansan, as I'll be moving on shortly to the online newspaper division of a national media company).

The Kansan wants its archives back, in order to restore the website to its full self, to provide a digital archive of what goes on at KU and in Lawrence, and to keep the work of our dedicated journalists alive and accessible. Recovery is not an easy process, but it's a process we are waist-deep into, trying to find the best course to take us neck-deep.