Pavlovia is currently down: fire at datacenter

Hi everyone we can confirm that the pavlovia server was fortunately in a building that was not affected by the fire. We are currently waiting to hear when OVH will be able to turn the power back on and we will update you as soon as we know more.

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This suggests that they said they would, but I don’t doubt it will probably take them a while to retrieve everything for everyone affected.

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Thanks Wakecarter! I thought that was the case, but couldn’t see the GDPR page via Google cache/Web archive.

Data are indeed backed up but we have a lot of data and that will take time to build the server back from that. We moved the server from London to Strasbourg (now looking like a shame!) in Jan 2021 and the data transfer alone took several days. We’re hoping that OVH will be able to reconnect power to our server long before the data-from-backup solution has completed, although we will start moving data to a new server as well, just in case.

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Thanks Jon - I can imagine regarding the size. Had to just clarify, as its something i’m going to get asked a lot today :slight_smile:

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This post also provides some more information about the situation

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Just to check if I understand correctly. Since Pavlovia servers are not in affected buildings, there would NOT be any data loss and we just need to wait for OVH to bring the servers back online, which according to this twitter https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/1369665936379281409, would be sometime next week?

Yes, I’m just preparing a post about that and giving more info about the whys etc. The long and short of it is that no data are lost at all. We were hoping they’d have power back earlier than that but we are currently rebuilding Pavlovia at a new site from backup data (unfortunately, it takes time to copy over - there are several terrabytes of data). For users that absolutely need to collect the data immediately we can make that happen on a backup server (you will need to get in touch) but it will make things more messy in terms of project merging and where to sync, so we strongly recommend you wait until we’re fully operational instead.

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Hello Jon,

Thank you for updating us. I was planning to start running my experiment on Friday. Do you think the server will be ready at that time? If it is not, I should look for other options since I already collected data from my participants. (I should not wait long between data collection due to methodological reasons)

With my best regards,

Kübra

Hi Kübra, Sorry to hear you have been affected by this. We have sent you a direct message so we can take it from there. Becca

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Hello Jon and Becca,

Unfortunately, we had to start running our study today and we need to collect the data very urgently (before this weekend). Do you think it is possible to do before Friday? Who can we contact in this case?

Thank you very much for your help,
Kinds regards,
Alice

Dear @Becca,

I am running a multiple session study and each session must occur approximately 7 days after each one, so it would be very problematic for me to just have access to pavlovia next week as I would potentially have to lose some participants who have started the experiment in the previous weeks. Is there any way of going around this?

I am very happy to hear that I have not lost all data.

Thank goodness.

Hi Becca and Jon

Currently, we are conducting an experiment, and we have made appointments with several participants for the next few days. Can you give as a reference date for when the page will be back? That would help us and our participants to plan ahead.

Hey Jon and Becca, thanks for keeping us updated throughout this very unfortunate event!
We are in the middle of running a multiple-session experiment, with 1 day of break between sessions.
We have delayed the 2nd session for a couple of participants today, but have the sixth and final session scheduled for 4 participants tomorrow - which cannot be postponed. I would very much appreciate your help in finding a way to get the experiment running for those guys so we don’t have to give up on all their progress.

All the best,
Gilad

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Hi Jon

Thank you for working on this. I also have a multiple-session study where each session would take place 3 days apart. We have already re-scheduled 3 participants from today and we have more participants scheduled for tomorrow and Friday. May I know when is the earliest that you can get the server to run again? What are other alternative solutions?

Thank you.

p.s. One lesson we can all learn from this is to always download and save our data regularly regardless of whether it is saved on a cloud or not. It’s always better to have backups in several secure locations.

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Is there a temporary server that live experiments can migrate to temporarily?
Thanks

I’ve now posted more details on what happened and the recovery plan here:

@SinclairAmend we’re going to be exploring that tomorrow first thing. In particular whether we can start using the server while the data are migrated over from the backups

Thank you Jon!