Dataclysm

The Dataclysm was a data loss on BZPower in which all topics, posts, and PMs made from late Semptember 2008 to March 2009 were deleted. Other names for the event include the "BZ-Pocalypse" and simply "the data loss."
As a result of the Dataclysm, many topics for comics and sprite kits were either partially or completely deleted from BZPower. However, many were reposted after the forums returned.
==Announcement==
The following is part of the news story posted when the forums were brought back online following the Dataclysm:
On Tuesday, March 10th in the late evening (Eastern Time) we began receiving reports of topics with no posts in them. We quickly took the forums offline to hopefully prevent any further damage from taking place. Once we began to examine the situation, we discovered that both the entire posts table and the private messages table of BZPower's database, essentially every single post and message that have been made, had been deleted. The forums were kept offline, and our hosting company was contacted to restore the table from the most recent backup, which we believed to have been a week or two ago.
As it turns out, things often don't go as we expect them to, and the most recent usable backup was from September 2008. This is not anyone's fault, it's just a result from an unfortunate oversight that we intend to correct moving onwards. Having little choice, we asked our host to replace the posts and messages tables with the ones from the backup. Once this had been done, we realized this still left all of the topics that had been posted since September 2008 with no posts in them. We opted to have them removed, asking our hosts to replace the topics table with the one from the backup.
Due to a miscommunication, the entire site was rolled back by our host to the one in the backup. This meant all members, news stories, blog posts, etc, since September 2008 were gone. This was obviously not what we intended to happen, and we quickly tried to get things straightened out between ourselves and our host. This took longer than expected, and the site or forums were offline for the rest of Wednesday, through to today as a result.
==External Links==
*Explanation of the Dataclysm on BZPower