Hackers destroy Avsim!

Read about this yesterday. Really don't understand why someone would do this and what they get out of it, but at the same time I would have expected there to be some sort of external backup solution :(. Big loss to the flight sim community, I used it quite a lot.
 
Aye used it a fair bit myself, that site was a great asset to the FS community, its a sad day :(
 
Chronictank said:
Well.. if his system worked for 13 years why would he spend more money on something he (assumably) gives for free?
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Because it makes absolutely perfect sense?

Imagine if every business and every educational and governmental establishment in the world took the attitude that "its worked so far so why should we bother with backups". If I had 13 years of my work, my effort, my time and dedication, there is no way that I wouldnt bother to externally back it up. Doesnt need to even be anything fancy, could just be an external hard disk, cheap as chips these days. I work in the industry and even going 1 day without backing up what I have to deal with is unthinkable, let alone 13 years.

I have a website for my guild and I have that backed up on a USB stick... and thats just a website for a guild. Makes perfect sense to me to ensure I have a backup of something that I have invested time in.
 
But these hackers are the same groups of people who crack and steal software - so surely they must be cool?
 
I am not a flight sim fan, and have never been interested in the genre, but this seems such an odd target for an attack by hackers. There is nothing to be gained, be it monetary or the taking down of a big name (not that either of these are a justification.) It just comes off as really spiteful.
 
I read about this last night and you know what I still can't believe how crazy (stupid?) the owner was. It is harsh but come on for christ sake what a silly thing to do and for 13 years? With no external backup? :confused:

Even if the site was backed up externally every 6-12 months it would have been at least something to fall back on. To go so long with no external backup leaves me in disbelief. The method what was used server to server is an accident waiting to happen. You cannot even rely or trust upon data centres to protect your data.. even ones that offer a full in house backup solution. External backs are a MUST! I understand the site was probably huge running into GBs of data but it is still no excuse.

It is such a shame as the site was brilliant and had such a large collection it was the place to go for when I got the FS itch.. the only hope I can see is if everyone bands together and shares what they downloaded from the site. No doubt there will be people out there who pretty much downloaded everything from the site, but the real hard work will be re-writing descriptions of the files etc..

Such a shame.

I agree matt0r it is a strange target.
 
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That is just crazy and irresponsible.

As has already been mentioned, drives are cheap these days. At the least, he could have slapped a drive in a caddy and used it to do a fullbackup once a week, or even once a month. It's not rocket science.

My company relies heavily on the contents of one of our two servers. The dev machine is only backed up onsite daily but the all important production server is backed up onsite daily, to another server offsite daily and on top of that, my 3 partners and I all have local copies as well.
 
Guys you have to remember,

The guy who ran the site did so for free as far as im aware, it would have cost him a lot of money to keep 2 servers online and supplying the bandwidth he did for downloads and such. Maybe he couldnt afford an external backup solution??

How much data would there have been, close on a 100's of gb's i would guess. That would cost a lot more in time and investment to backup. A backup between servers would have been more than enough for any normal situation. Ie he was not a business.
 
Datamonkey said:
Guys you have to remember,

The guy who ran the site did so for free as far as im aware, it would have cost him a lot of money to keep 2 servers online and supplying the bandwidth he did for downloads and such. Maybe he couldnt afford an external backup solution??

How much data would there have been, close on a 100's of gb's i would guess. That would cost a lot more in time and investment to backup. A backup between servers would have been more than enough for any normal situation. Ie he was not a business.
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The costs are irrelevant, to quote the guy himself "our backup strategy had nothing to do with financial resources or the lack there of. We could have purchased any number of alternative systems to back up our system"

So the costs involved were not an issue at all. At the end of the day it boils down to what value you place on your data. I value my website enough that I back it up externally, and its just a pointless website, I absolutely most definately would value 13 years of my hard work enough that I would do the same.

Dont get me wrong, what the hackers did was terrible and despicable, but the lack of external backups when talking about 13 years worth of work simply shows enormous lack of foresight and administrative planning.
 
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The point is he did it in his spare time he doesnt owe any of you anything so it isn't "irresponsible", and cant be compared to a corporate world as at the end of the day even if it was all lost it doesn't really matter all that much

He "could" have put a better system in, but this would involve time, money and effort he obviously didn't want to expend. Hence his current system seemed to be working and he didnt bother expanding it.

While it is silly it is by no means "crazy" or "unbelievable"
 
Chronictank said:
The point is he did it in his spare time he doesnt owe any of you anything so it isn't "irresponsible", and cant be compared to a corporate world as at the end of the day even if it was all lost it doesn't really matter all that much

He "could" have put a better system in, but this would involve time, money and effort he obviously didn't want to expend. Hence his current system seemed to be working and he didnt bother expanding it.

While it is silly it is by no means "crazy" or "unbelievable"
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I made no indication that he owes us anything. I agree entirely that he owes us nothing.

I am merely commentating from a personal viewpoint, simply that if it was me and it involved 13 years of my hard work I would want to do everything I could to ensure that I didnt end up losing 13 years of my own time/work. Not from a standpoint of anyone else, but for my own sake.

To me that is indeed not only silly, but is indeed also crazy and unbelievable. Looking at it from a personal view. Everyone is different and everyone puts different values on things in life, and everyone has different attitudes to things in life of course. Thats just my view on how I would look at 13 years worth of my work and what safeguards I would do to cover my work.
 
Tombstone said:
Indeed, seems an odd site to target, you have to think that its someone with a grudge of some kind rather than a random hit.
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I'd have to agree. I does seem a bit too strange for a random hit, definitely would appear to be more personal. A real loss of what was a great resource though.
 
There was talk that id was done by an employee that got fired a few hours before the site went down. Remains to be seen if thats true though.

Would love to know how much they've received in donations in the last couple of days. Would be a stroke of genius if it was a money making stunt!

Sure they will be back with a new site before too long. Just hope they can recover the forum posts as the massive knowledge base was the most valuable thing lost imo.
 
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