Rogue Project's Crash
Rogue Project's Crash
For over a year now I have maintained Rogue Project's Friendica Instance. I have had ups and downs. Sometimes it was smooth sailing and other times it was a storm. This week catastrophe hit. I was trying to deal with severe database bloat. My database had nearly filled my SSD of my VPS. I have a VPS with more than enough resources and this should not have happened. I was merely, due to inexperience, trying to maintain way to much persistence of federated data. I was in the process of trying to migrate from using my database as my main storage to the new file system storage that Friendica made available as of Friendica 'Blutwurz' 2026.01. I was attempting to truncate the storage cache in the database when disaster happened. I lost my whole Instance. I tried for days to extract the 2GB of data that was supposed to still be in the data file with no success. I finally just restarted my Instance. It is a fresh start and lessons learned. The database had grown to over 178GB and that prohibited my being able to download backups. I pay $50.00 USD a month for just 100GB of data and it would have cost me more than I could afford to download the backups. This was one of the reasons I was concerned about the bloat. The other was the impending shut down of the Instance when the database maxed out the SSD.
I do not take it lightly that my users lost all their data on my Instance. I am a seasoned System Administrator and I knew better than to operate without database backups. I just did not have the resources as things got out of hand. Between trying to maintain the Instance and work full time. When the Instance bloated there was no easy fix. I have taken preventive measures so that this cannot happen again. My storage is now on the file system so the database will stay manageable and I will not lose user data again. I have also setup more aggressive clean up measures and backups just in case of hardware failure on my VPS part. This is a very sad thing and I hope that Rogue Project's Friendica can rebuild and move past this.
Unus Nemo