At the moment piratecraft is currently whitelisted for maintenance.

At 5:18am this morning (23/02/2014) the server crashed because our hosting HDD storge got completly filled up, we run on SSD for maximum performance, This is due to sharing a node with other servers, a few of these children running servers used third party backup solutions, didnt configure them properly and filled up the shared node/server.
Now this is where it gets bad, It took me about 4 hours to diagnose and figure out what had happened, what was affected, get a hosting responce, get a responce from plugin developers, thankfully I have such amazing community to help me get through stresful situations like this.

When the server rebooted, it booted without any configs for Griefprevetnion, Wordborder, GroupManager, Autorank and a few other vital plugins. These configs were overwritten by completly blank data, keeping the files but clearing out the content inside them.
The reason for this was explained to me in a developer responce:

If you run out of space, every plugin that writes data on shutdown will erase its own data, it is a terrible flaw. This is why I keep backups of essentials, and switched to SQL for GP. The data you need is absolutely lost in its current state.

What this means is that it gets worse, GriefPrevetnion claim data for everybodies claims is lost, The Hosting company does not keep backups, I do not have backups of this specific data, which Im kicking myself for, since its not exactly practical to FTP into a server every day and manually take backups of everything.
With no griefprevention protecting anything, this left the server exposed to any player that joined in the 2 hour period it took me to notice anything was strange with the server on a sunday morning.

Now, We caught this just in time, The world isnt damaged, I have automatic worldbackups, Stats are not damaged, So I can get Autorank working again, Worldborder is a 1 command fix, But Claims are lost, Player data seems to not be wiped, but the claims themselfs are all gone.

This strange and uniqie problem has left me and reaper in a very, very sticky situation, Our hosting provider didnt come back with anything helpful at all (Surprise, Surprise) and im furious at myself for not considering this could have been a problem.

I don’t think this was caused by hackers, just poor execution of hosting providers (For the third time) and my ignorance for trusting a minecraft hosting company to keep backups.

What will happen then?
We have to re-claim the land, Thankfully we have such an amazing admin, Iamtherepaer89 has spent countless hours scouring the map for visable buildings and admin claiming them, but there is no way we will be able to even make a dent in the 380+ claims that were made on the server.

I will move griefprevention data to a new database system which I can make automatic backups from to external hosting providers.

But what I want now, from PirateCraft players are ideas on how we handle opening the server back up with hundreads of un-claimed buildings, its a pirates paradice for looting and griefing, and there will be a lot of drama which I am not looking forward to.

You can see the current protected buildings that reaper has claimed on the live map.