[Dylan Leblanc]

The reason the diagrams section was offline for over a month was that a database accident occurred while I was working on the site. This resulted in some building data being permanently lost. There was a backup of the database available, but because of the nature of the data loss it took some time to put everything back together and not all building data can be restored.

Data for about 5,000 buildings has been lost, though not all data for these 5,000 buildings is gone. The data for these buildings that has been lost consists of:

- the city the building is in
- building name (name, native name, additional names, address)
- building status
- building use (primary only)
- structure type (primary only)
- construction dates
- floor count
- various other numerical data (gross floor area, elevator count, etc.)

No drawings have been lost, no height data has been lost.

For all buildings which data has been lost there is still record that the building exists in the database, and all additional building data (heights, drawings, secondary building uses and structure types, descriptions, external URLs, building style and materials) is still fully intact. From this remaining data and any drawings associated with a building we should be able to restore some of these lost buildings by figuring out what they are and reentering the data. Because of this I have removed the capability of adding new buildings so that we do not create duplicate entries for buildings which already exist and should be manually restored.

Some of the buildings in the database now contain out of date data as a result of restoring from the backup database. The out of date data is mostly apparent in buildings which have been proposed or under-construction in the past year and have either been completed or put on hold or cancelled in this time.

Not all buildings have been restored so far, and some cities are not available yet either. I am still piecing some of the building data back into the database. Even so, when all data that can be has been restored there will be about 1,800 drawings which are associated with a building we have no name for and don't know what city it's in, and are therefore not appearing in the diagrams anymore. I will do what I can to get these drawings back into the diagrams by figuring out their associated building data.

I feel very, very terrible for allowing this data loss happen. Accidents do occur, and that's why database backups are supposed to be done regularly. The main reason why a more recent database backup was not available is because of a bug in the backup function for the database and the cumbersome steps needed to be done to deal with this bug. I have already taken steps to fix this problem and ensure backups are done more often.