Hi Guys,

I 'had' a windows server with the the planet which hosted around 700 - 800 domains and came across a problem with mssql certificate issue , and waited for 24 hours without response and then as an immidiate solution i opened a ticket for server reimage.

I asked to them mount my C: drive as secondary and start the reimage process Initial reimage failed and the process was aborted (i got this info from the tracking ticket they opened). I asked them whats the problem and they said they are restarting the process. After almost 6-8 hours, the server was back up running. And them i noticed something "There was no data in the server "

Two drives with 150 GB disk space was "AT MY SERVICE". I tot it might be a mistake and they might have mounted the wrong drive. So i updated the ticket asking them to mount the correct drive. And a very "CUSTOMER FREINDLY" reply came

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Unfortunately it appears that we were unable to preserve the data on this drive. As it appears that you do not currently subscribe to any of our backup services such as NAS or DiskSync, do you have any off site backups elsewhere that you can recover from?
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and them i updated them with a bit of fumes >>> no response for three hours >>> i asked for updates again . Them they came back

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I apologize for the delay in response.
As stated previously, it appears we were unable to preserve the data on the original C drive. This drive is mounted as D, currently. Recovery of data is not a service that The Planet provides.
At this time, the recommend course of action would be a recovery from one's off site backups.
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Now they have picturized it to be my mistake , that i hadnt used their paid offsite backup service..

Guys what should i do at this stage.. i lost all my valuable data trusting the planet support...
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The issue was also reported in webhostingtalk.com but the community member had a fixing with theplanet and closed the ticket abrubtly. not only that he has edited lot of critical comments posted by users on theplanet

for details visit http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=611898

Guys please help us in these issues.

Sorry to hear about your data loss keeping a second remote backup of your own is always worth while for times like this.

If you don't have any backups you can restore its worth installing some sort of file recovery program on the server to see what data you can get off the failed drive.

Tis a sad event. I had that happen to me too. Some hosts say they "will" provide backups, but I haven't seen anyone do that at all. It's best to keep data on your own PC, but from a customers point of view it can be tough. Imagin saving around 1-20 GB of data say monthly.. Hence why I like hosts which either keep a secondary HD installed, so if the 1st fails your still safe. Or keeps a backup daily or every 24 hrs and deletes it, when re-writing after the next 24 hrs.

its advice to maintain own copy of site backup. and download to local pc .. at least once a week.

anything can happen. and all data can be gone by the next day.

Ouch, sorry to hear that. Technician errors can be deadly. They need to offer you some kind of credit for their mistake. I mean, it was their mistake. It was not a drive failure, the server didn't blow up. The technician hosed your machine, hands down. The issue is they have so many clients, it's just an "Opps" for them and move on. While for you, it's a "I can't pay rent/mortage this month because of no more income".

This is old Rackshack type service, they've done this to me before as well. Except I had backups already on a secondary drive. They reimage things like yesterdays newspaper. I'm not suprised to see it happen now since ev1/theplanet merged. Probably the same trigger happy techs or poor training.

Not having alternate backups is not their fault, that would be yours, which I'm sure you've heard enough people say to drive you up a wall so I'll end it with that.

Update; In the WHT ticket I see you already recovered 80% of the data, that's better than nothing.

I've been hearing lots of TP horror stories lately.

I agree with you there however, what if someone has over 1GB+ files/databases etc..? That's a crazy backup per a week or month etc..

That's one of the things I hate is backing up those large databases. I personally think hosts should have a daily HD backup every 24 hrs. Then the next backup, it overwrites all data for the new backup etc..

1 + gig files are not uncommon. I backup sites with this daily.