It seems that in my attempt to upgrade Lemmy versions from 7.3 to 8.0, it had corrupted the database.
The worst part is that I failed to even implement the simplest of backup practices. So all data has been lost. I’ve spent most of the night in my attempts to try to recover some of the data, but to no avail.
And for that I am sorry.
As a response to this I’ve now set up periodic database dumps (backups) to prevent this from happening in the future.
For anyone looking to make Stellar Castle your home, I would encourage you to wait until I am confident that the data protection on this instance is robust enough so that complete data loss is highly unlikely.
In the next few days, I will be restoring the communities that I’ve created, and from there we can rebuild. On the bright side, all of the communities are new, and so not much has been lost. Though I do understand and deeply empathize with those who created accounts on this instance and have now lost it. I’ll do whatever I can to prevent this from happening again.
Here’s to hoping for a smoother ride.