[SeanMcKnetic]

Hold tight. Things are indeed afoot. AP repointed the URLs to show that they still work and to point them somewhere more useful than that Apache holding page!!

I know Guy was optimistically holding out for us to be able to retain some data and content, but after three weeks of grappling with trying to salvage it I am 99% certain that it's a write off. The main point of failure wasn't so much the hack, but that the daily backups that are taken at host level had been failing for months despite them having a "backup successful" timestamp. Alas, we didn't spot this BEFORE we needed to rely on a backup and nobody at the host end can tell my WHY they're failing (it's not a storage space thing as I doubled that capacity lately).

I have had the tech teams at our old hosts, new hosts, AND a PHP expert buddy of mine all look at our data and they largely groaned and told me to prepare for the worst.

I've spent about 45 hours trying to sort this issue out since it went bang, and so I had mentally already reached the point of accepting a 'worst case scenario' where all content was lost. This was healthy as it allowed me to focus and consult with Guy & AP about how to move forward rather than burn through all my spare time trying to retrieve the past.

We have a new platform via vBulletin. I am not sharing the long, garbled URL because a) right now it's empty and needs a bunch of work done to prep it for going live, and b) at a suitable moment, AP will flick a switch and re-direct the Surrey Scoobies web address/DNS over to it.

I don't wanna put a timeframe on anything. This is the first time I've come up for air really, so I've been leaving Guy to keep people updated. We will TRY to be up and running before the end of August, that's all I can say without tying my own noose, and knowing how much faffing about is still to be done!!