Sorry for the downtime, server crashed and I wasn't able to address it quickly or smoothly in my current mental state.

I took advantage of the downtime, and probably exacerbated it a little, and finally did the migration back to local hardware... so it *should* be more reliable.

What honestly stretched it out a lot is that I also applied the most recent stable Friendica version and that took forever to update the database.

Housing situation has been a pain, still on the temporary server environment and been hitting major resources bottlenecks.

I'm hoping to get a place sooner, but I've hit some roadblocks that very likely will push it drastically further out... in which case I'll need to spend more money on this environment to return things to stable.

Reminder that I'm covering this entirely out of my own pocket and these constraints are because I'm between homes and can't use my own much cheaper hardware. If you appreciate this instance I would very much appreciate a donation.

So the temporary system had some sort of failure, I'm not even 100% sure what caused it to be honest. It went down sometime yesterday and some of the virtual drives got corrupted, which caught the database and the virtual gateway device.

I was able to restore the system... most of the way. Thankfully there are backups of the database, but some of them were also flawed as well, the most recent intact one was from 5/16, so 5 days were lost.

To be clear, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there's not as much redundancy in the temporary setup (sadly it looks like it'll be a few more months before I have a place of my own and can spin up my own hardware again). But I'm going to still look at how I might get those in better shape.

As far as how long it took: I had a busy day yesterday and didn't see that the server was down until I was too exhausted to do anything about it, so it had to wait until I got off work today... each attempt at restoring the database takes around an hour, so that took *a while* to get restored.

If y'all have had issues uploading images... sorry about that.

I missed a setting when re-configuring the server after transfer to it's current environment and it's fixed now.

Longer Explanation: there are two servers involved, a reverse proxy and then the actual Friendica server. The Friendica server accepted uploads up to 100MB... the proxy didn't have that setting... so it would just go for a bit, then timeout. Added that setting to the proxy and all solved.

Thank you for your patience!

The server has been migrated to a new dedicated remote server (hosted with OVH) and to the newest version of Friendica (2024.03, previously it was 2023.12).

Things should stabilize mostly for the time being, but I will be on the lookout for bugs.

The downtime for server transfer is coming up sooner now, I've had to twist a few things to make it work and my apologies for any inconvenience.

I deleted a large chunk of the media on the server, primarily focusing on data that hasn't been accessed in 60 days, but it does look like it hit a few more recent pieces.

If you've been with us for a few months you might have lost some old photo uploads, some old contacts might have blurry profile photos for a while until the system decides to redownload them later.

To be clear, this *only* impacted images and we don't offer any guarantees against data loss on this server, especially with uploaded images. There's simply too much data there for me to reasonably back up at this time, and worse yet there really isn't any distinction in Friendica that allows me to backup only local media as opposed to cached remote media.

I'm going through some financial crisis right now and forced to couch surf for the next few months, so I'm not going to have a place or the server ***BUT*** it won't be offline more than a few hours.

There's going to be a short downtime sometime in the next few days. Things are a mess so I don't have an exact set time.

But I've temporarily rented a dedicated server from OVH for my needs and will be migrating the server there so that it can stay online while I work on getting a new place.

Additionally, when the time comes I will also be applying the new Friendica 2024.03 update.

A reminder that I'm located in the US, and more particularly in Texas and this is a server run out of my home.

With the massive freeze incoming this weekend, there is a decent chance of a significant and extended power outage (Texas has a notoriously awful and poorly managed power grid, notably run completely separate from the rest of the country).