Hello everyone!

As some may have discovered by now, we have unfortunately suffered data loss from the ROBOTC website as of 12/20/2013. This has caused significant downtime for our customers and we apologize for these issues. We have been actively working to mitigate the damage caused and to prevent any other data from being lost. Details on the data loss can be found below:

What happened:
On December 20th, 2013, there was a faulty upgrade to the MySQL service on our primary web server which caused a data loss incident. A backup was not performed by our hosting company before performing the upgrade on our behalf. Anything that used database technology (Blogs, Wiki, Forums) suffered data loss from this.

What is affected:
Forums - Several posts made immediately prior to the failed upgrade were lost; these damages are relatively minimal, and the forum has remained relatively unaffected by the data loss as we had a pretty recent backup available to restore from.

Blogs – About 75 blog posts were also lost, but we are in the process of rectifying the situation and expect to have most of the missing posts (other than new release notices and lower priority news posts) restored in the near future thanks to cross posting on sites.

Wiki - The Wiki was hit the hardest by the data loss and much our newer content was lost. This includes the newer support guides and all of the ROBOTC 4.0 content (VEX IQ and VEX Cortex) changes. However, we are actively working on updating and mitigating this loss as much as possible thanks to backups and our “offline” versions from our CHM/Help system.

ROBOTC.net website - The ROBOTC.net website was offline sporadically during and post-update due to MySQL services not being able to connect to their database. Most of these issues are resolved at the moment, but if you find a broken link please make us aware of it.

What is not affected:
ROBOTC development, licensing and order processing are on a different network systems from the public website and are unaffected by the data loss.

Moving Forward:
We have taken several steps to mitigate the long-term damage including migrating to a new, more reliable server host and restoring backup versions of content (where applicable). This migration and restoration project will take a few weeks to complete.

We have also updated the online version of our Help documentation (links below) with the latest versions found with the applicable ROBOTC installations. These help files contain copies of many of the commonly used wiki pages that be referenced while we work on restoring the primary content.

Because of this incident, we also are working on overhauling our support system (wiki, help files, etc) for a more streamlined experience and will post more details on these updates as soon as possible.

We thank everyone for their patience as we work through these issues and will continue to post updates as needed.

Update:
The current online help files (which include many of the useful pages that were lost from the wiki) can be found below.

* ROBOTC for VEX Robotics (4.0)
* ROBOTC for LEGO Mindstorms (3.0)
* ROBOTC for VEX Cortex and PIC (3.0)
* ROBOTC for Arduino (3.0)

Just as an update... we have finished migrating the ROBOTC server and services to new hosting. As of today, ROBOTC e-mail is now hosted by Google, and ROBOTC website and database is now hosted by Amazon Web Services.

Purchasing and License Database is still managed by a 3rd party system, so those items were not affected during the outage.

If you run into any dead links or things that don't seem to be working correctly, please let us know on the forums or by sending a ticket into support[at]robotc(dot)net.

Thanks!