Railroad picture archives.net gone what do you guys use now

[bnsfdash8]

It looks like site is back up, but it looks like some pictures aren't showing up anymore. A lot of ones I've uploaded aren't there. Hopefully that's just temporary.

[C855B]

It looks like site is back up, but it looks like some pictures aren't showing up anymore. A lot of ones I've uploaded aren't there. Hopefully that's just temporary.

Yes, I just looked. Lordy, it's fast!!! But I guess that between the missing pictures and that none of you clowns are hogging the bandwidth yet, it oughta be fast.

I checked the search I was using for modeling research before the crash. I estimated that 15-20% of the listings in the index linked to no picture or an error page, but worse, there were less than 1/4 of the number of pages as there were before. Like you, fingers are crossed that the database is being incrementally reloaded/recovered.

[Mark5]

It looks like site is back up

Thanks for the heads up! I have an account there, I have a collection of 1960s/1970s photos, so I uploaded a few a number of years back. They never approved any of my photos, nor did they ever respond when I asked what the issue was.

Maybe I'll try again once the smoke clears. 

Mark

[flight2000]

Here's a screen shot of the FB post explaining the update/issues with missing data and photos.  Even with some data lose, I'm super happy it's back up (and faster too).

[ Guests cannot view attachments ]

Cheers,
Brian

[Cory Rothlisberger]

Mother of God! It now takes longer to brew a pot of coffee than it does to view a single photo!

[James Costello]

From the MFCL:

I started looking through the recently recovered RR Picture Archives, and there is a significant amount of photo data missing, as he explained in the announcement about the server recovery process. Just looking at one of my photo albums linked here, which contains 123 photos, only the locomotive photos still have the equipment data tagged:

http://drolsen.rrpicturearchives.net/archiveThumbs.aspx?id=33121&Page=1

The freight car photos have no car number attached to them. The photo still exists, and the car number appears in the title, but the photo is not tagged, so the car can’t be found going through the database. The freight car information still exists in the database, so when you tag the photo with the car number, it associates with all the existing car info again, but it will require all users to manually go back their photos and tag them again. I have 7,734 photos in my account, of which probably 3/4 are freight cars. The only way to find them is to go into each photo album, open the individual photos, edit, and tag them again.

A few photos appear to have gotten corrupted and will have to be uploaded again, but that had happened even before this most recent server issue.

On the flip side, since the freight car data still exists, you can go through the menu to locate cars by type and then number, but there are no photos associated with most of the car numbers, so it doesn’t return any images. This will be a long process to re-associate and recover everything, but I’m glad the photos weren’t lost. The new servers load much faster now, which is a plus.

Despite all of this, the pop-up ads all work perfectly and continue to obscure each new page that you open.

Dave Olsen
Manassas, VA

Good to know that some normalcy has returned 

[C855B]

"...some data missing..." is a huge understatement. Like I said above, what I found, or, rather, didn't find in my knowing what was there before the big crash indicates that a great amount of the database was lost. Maybe I'm off-base, who knows, but my SWAG is roughly 60% is gone or at least not there at the moment.

The big problem is so, so much of the pre-digital-camera images are missing. Those are going to be hard to replace because many of those contributors have also passed into that big bit-bucket in the sky.

[Mark5]

Ok, I tried to activate my account again ...



I did this before (sometime pre-pandemic) - never got a response.

I have lots of 1960s & 1970s slides (which supposedly they want). I bought many of them for the express purpose of sharing the images with other modelers.

I hope I hear back from them this time.

Mark

[nkalanaga]

He's still working on getting the pictures and links restored.  I got this email today, after sending him a polite note on what worked (very little) in one group of GN photos:

"Thanks for the info here.  We do have a known issue with rollingstock taggings missing.  I am currently working on getting this restored, but I may not be able to get this fixed for a few more days.
Tim"

Having recently moved 2.6 TB of data from one external hard drive to another, on USB 3, I can understand how long it takes to reload everything.  My move took 14 hours.  On the older USB 2, it would probably have been days.  And I suspect that he has a LOT more data than I do.

[nkalanaga]

More detail from Tim Huemmer this morning:

"The actual photographs were not the issue here.  The web server that houses them did not suffer any sort of loss; however it is an old server and I took this opportunity to move the data over to a new server while things are down.  Since I'm copying across a network, its taking quite a while.

The server that crashed was the database server.  It was setup in a Raid-5 configuration, but 2 of the member drives failed around the same time which then rendered the array unusable.  I had to send the drives off to a data salvage/repair company who was able to get the database back, but its got some corruption in it due to the harddrive crash (and potentially the repair/re-image process).  Since the site had been down for so long, I opted to repair the database the best that I could and got things up and running.  In the background, the data salvage company is taking another pass at the database and hopefully I'll be able to restore a few more things that were corrupt in the first pass (namely the rollingstock/picture tags).  I got word from them on Friday afternoon that the process was around 35% complete and they don't expect to have anything back until Monday.

Long story short, the pictures themselves are pretty safe (I have a lot of them backed up to AWS as well), but the database issues are what is causing most of the problems you may be seeing on the site.

Sorry for all of the detail here but being in data processing, I'm sure you can relate to a lot of this."

So, it looks like nothing has been lost, it's just inaccessible without the database server, which is taking a while to restore.

[Mark5]

Thanks for sharing that - sounds like he's up to his ears trying to get it all migrated.

Maybe I'll give them until next year to respond to my recent attempt at uploads.

Mark

[C855B]

That's certainly great news. Thanks!

[nkalanaga]

Yes, as many pictures as he hosts, it would take a long time to move all of them, even without hardware and software problems.  But at least all of the data is safe, even if it isn't accessible for a while.

I'd guess that the first of the year would probably be a good estimate.  Even after everything is restored, there will probably be small issues to correct, and some of those won't be apparent right away.

[nickelplate759]

In case it isn't apparent, RAID 5 only protects against the failure of a single drive.
If one drive fails and you don't notice (most RAID controllers will raise an alert of some sort), and then another goes, you're hosed.

Fancy ($$$) RAID controllers have the ability to hot-swap spare drives when a failure is detected, but even then it can take hours for the necessary data to migrate to the spare, and if a second drive fails before the spare is ready, you are still hosed.

There are more elaborate RAID schemes (and more expensive RAID controllers) that offer more robust protection, none are entirely bullet-proof.  In the end, your data is only as safe as your backups.

[peteski]

Even RAID6 would have prevented the problem, but no RAID is 100% fault tolerant.  Yes, there are virtual and adaptive RAIDs which can withstand multiple drives failing, but still not fully fault tolerant.