Over the last few weeks I have been putting my forensics skills to good use by collecting data from numerous sources to re-populate the WiBit.Net database.

The database loss was devastating, no doubt, and I have been working a lot to make sure the site is not only functional and stable, but also recoverable in the event of another disaster. I have tested and retested the new disaster recovery plan well over 100 times since the database incident. Once I felt confident in the process and saw the site run very well under the circumstances, I moved my attention to what I could recover.

I am collecting everything I can: logs, audit reports, outgoing emails, vendor reports, etc. and have been spending a lot of time normalizing the data from all of these disparate sources into some form that I can use to write software to make use of it. This alone has been monumental; not only parsing and storing, but validating and testing.

At the time of this writing, I am working on testing the restoration of user accounts that were lost, as well as updating the ones that were restored from the December 2016 backup. For example, users that changed their email addresses, etc. I am also testing logic to repopulate user activity, such as videos watched. I wasn’t able to locate log entries and audits for every user, but I think many and most active users will be accounted for. Quiz data is going to be a bit more complicated, but I think it can be done. I will look into that at a later time.

Once I have this logic working to my satisfaction, I will put up a notice on the site announcing a date to temporarily take it offline while I run the user update script and bring it back up when done. The user activity script can run with the site online. The reason I don’t want the site online when user accounts are being changed / added is just to prevent any chances that there is a conflict with natural user activity. All user accounts touched during this process will receive an email notification explaining what was done to their account within a few weeks. The next thing I will work on is recovering WiBit.Net Sponsors. More information on this in a following announcement once I get to this process. One thing I can say is that if you have re-sponsored the site or if you want to sponsor the site and had a sponsorship before you will be taken into account in the algorithm, so there is nothing to worry about! Please feel free to support the site between now and then if you wish to do so. Any issues that may come up we will work out with you. Contact me at [email protected] if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks so much to everyone for their continued patience and support! I am a one person operation at the moment so it is taking me longer to get these tasks done, but you can believe me when I say: I have been working until the twilight hours every single night for WiBit.Net and for this community to try and get this issue behind us so we, as a community, can pick up where we left off before it happened and grow from there.