After reading the thread on missing rapids I started looking around.

The problem is worse then reported. It's affecting lots of rivers. In some reaches over three-quarters of the rapids are missing.

This is a disaster. I maintain dozens of reaches. In some cases the work on the AW site represents hundreds of hours of work and many hundreds of miles of driving to do research, take photos, etc. The information cannot easily be replaced.

This needs immediate attention; both to recover the lost data, and to prevent any more loss.

I've checked the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) and the info is not there (especially since you can only get info older then six months). It's not cached on Google since rapids are not the default tab. I was also unable to check the www2 AW site since the reach lookup is getting an SQL error.

Doesn't AW have backup tapes? This may require a restore.

One good thing is the problem doesn't appear to be affecting each state. My reaches in Maine and NH appear from first glance to be unaffected. However ALL of my reaches in Massachusetts have problems.

Please fix this now. It is really discouraging to see so much work lost.

thanks
/Skip

Wow. OK, I didn't know the proportion of the problem. We have backups that go back two weeks and several yearly snapshots. I'll do some comparisons of a year ago to today. One thing that could be happening is recycling of rapid ids. That would allow for insidious and inadvertent removal of rapids.

What about the WWW2 test database? Currently I get an SQL error when trying to loop up a reach.

A previous reply mentioned that the data was still there in some cases. I'd like to do a comparison and report on exactly what problems exist.

/Skip

www2 is fixed now.

Wrapped Rapid IDs were causing the deletions. I've reset those and the problem should not get worse. I will go through the backup during the weekend to extract the lost rapids.

I've addressed the deletion concerns on the test site with a confirmation step and a step that prevents physical deletion of a record.

Ryan

I restored 401 "deleted" rapids to the database. Can you check and see if some of the ones you noticed were among the ones restored? The restoration could cause some rapids to be listed twice if you happened to lift the descriptions from the old site.

Thanks jay and skip for alerting me to this problem. Please let me know if you notice any other inconsistencies.

Ryan

Ryan,

Yes!!!

I checked an everything that I noticed was missing is back.

Some rapids are indeed listed twice, but this is not a big deal. I presume we should just delete the extras.

Should I wait a week or two for things to settle down before cleaning up? Or delete the duplicates right away?

Thanks for taking care of this so quickly.

/Skip

No go ahead. Thanks for letting me know.

Ryan