Cuban Cigar Website Update

[mygar]

2 hours ago, oliverdst said:

I cant believe this could happen nowadays.

The company lost everything? Not only CCW is down? Somehow these guys must be sued. 

Total loss is very serious. Many businesses were lost. Data protection and security is of highest importance to any provider... 

[JC67]

Good luck guys,  I hope Younare able to retrieve all your hard work.

 

[joeypots]

This is a horror.  Good luck to the management.

[JohnS]

@ATGroom, we hear you dear esteemed friend and we share in your loss. This couldn't have come at a worse time, near Christmas, then again, when is it ever a good time to lose CCW and Dusky Beauties and your other sites? The Inventory? What a feature, but we can re-build it bigger and better and ever. Can you believe it, I took a hard copy print of my inventory 2 weeks ago. I can't wait to re-input my data when the site is back up and running!

Similarly, both myself and many other fine people here in our valued community can't wait to assist wherever we can when the time comes to re-build the site itself. We very much look forward to it!

[PatrickEwing]

Really rough news guys. Hang in there. As informative and handy as it gets. Appreciate all the effort and work. 

[bman75]

I apologize if someone already tried this, but what about pulling as much as possible from Internet Archive Wayback Machine?  Looks like the last snapshot was done 10-27-16.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/cubancigarwebsite.com

 

[bman75]

9 minutes ago, bman75 said:

I apologize if someone already tried this, but what about pulling as much as possible from Internet Archive Wayback Machine?  Looks like the last snapshot was done 10-27-16.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/cubancigarwebsite.com

 

Sorry - just saw Rye's solution a couple pages back.  In any case, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine version might have some more recent versions of CCW's pages.

If you never used Wayback Machine, it's a lot of fun.  You can check out FOH as it looked in 2005.

 

[dageshi]

Given the circumstances, I think I'd perhaps name and shame the company in question, if you've paid for backups as part of your service and they've botched them then frankly they deserve nothing less.

[Trevor2118]

19 hours ago, bman75 said:

In any case, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine version might have some more recent versions of CCW's pages.

If you never used Wayback Machine, it's a lot of fun.  You can check out FOH as it looked in 2005.

 

I occasionally do......and I cringe a little at my early versions. 

I'll be coming out of retirement to help Alex re-establish the website.  It will be a bit like 2008 again.

[fabes]

As has been previously stated, CCW truly is an invaluable resource to which every user is quite grateful. Your efforts are much appreciated by many. And please don't hesitate to reach out for help!

[Trevor2118]

On ‎8‎-‎12‎-‎2016 at 3:44 PM, NSXCIGAR said:

Yes, it certainly is. I'd say last updated in early-mid 2016? Only the most current 2016 releases are missing like the Edmundo Dantes Belicoso. Hopefully this is all they need to get 99.9% of the info recovered. The last 12 months would be a piece of cake. This may be a great stroke of luck.

Thanks, Rye.

The source Code states it was updated on Friday, 26 August, 2016. 

Unfortunately these mirror copies do NOT include a back-up copy of the data base.
It is a bit like just having a paper copy.

However it will be invaluable is assisting with the rebuild. 

[oliverdst]

18 minutes ago, Trevor2118 said:

The source Code states it was updated on Friday, 26 August, 2016. 

Unfortunately these mirror copies do NOT include a back-up copy of the data base.
It is a bit like just having a paper copy.

However it will be invaluable is assisting with the rebuild. 

Trevor, and I think I am talking for thousands in the cigar world, what you and Alex need we will be here.

[dageshi]

Just a thought, but if you do have a relatively recent flat file output of the site there's a good chance a parser can be written to extract the relevant data from the html ready to insert back into a database. It'd certainly be less painful than doing it by hand. I don't know what your current plans are, but I have some experience with writing such scrapers, if you'd like me to take a crack at getting the data back into a machine readable format let me know.

[Optic101]

We would call that a LOUSY company.

Trevor - Alex you build an exceptional site.

Thanks for that and I hope to help with whatever you need.

Good luck and let us know what we can do.

[ATGroom]

A few more details have emerged: basically, the host had an automated process in place to create two backup copies every night. The automated process would back up the different sites in the same order every night. Some time ago (months or years) the process began erroring out and stopping before it got to CCW. So there were no backups.

Then, the disk failed on the main server.

Obviously they were pretty negligent in not checking the integrity of the backups, but it is what it is. I can and will pursue them about getting some form of compensation, but it will not result in getting the data back.


The way websites work is that there is what the user sees which is flat HTML, and then behind that there is software and a database that generates that HTML. The cached version that is up on the site at the moment is this flat HTML, and has no "smarts" behind it. I have the intermediate software. I don't have the database at all - no schema, no stored procedures, nothing. Probably the quickest thing to do would be to reverse engineer the database and then build a bot to scrape the cached pages and automatically import them, however, when it comes down to it, CCW was built in 2008 when I was relatively inexperienced as a programmer, and just sort of hacked together since then. Rebuilding it with the skills I have now and 2016 technology will take a bit more time, but it will result in a better product all round.

So, the encyclopaedia, which is all that most users use, will survive. The real tragedy though is the loss of the collection management stuff. 1,500 users, 300k cigars, 15,000 reviews, 1000+ photos. I already had some stuff on the site with aggregate ratings and tasting notes. Occasionally I've generated statistics and posted them on FoH about the popularity of different things. I had big plans for some really interesting stuff I could do with that information once the dataset got big enough. It is now reset to zero. I also really feel for those of you who had spent long hours entering collections that sometimes numbered in the hundreds of boxes via my pretty clunky software.  I hope you'll use it again once I rebuild it.
 

Thanks again everyone for your support.
 

[golfgar]

Thanks for the update and the HTML files.  Good luck with the rest of the stuff.  "Dec 7, a day which will live in infamy".

[jazzboypro]

Thanks for the update and good luck !!