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Time Date	System Updates
Update 985 15 April 2023	An 'update followers' tick box has been provided on the calendar entry editing form. When ticked, users with permission 494 will be notified of the update. It is possible to set whether or not the 'Notify' box is ticked or not ticked by default in the settings of the calendar subject.
Update 955 19 January 2023	We apologise for the interruption to HOPS services this afternoon. The HOPS database locked itself up at 3.16 this afternoon upon detecting corrupted data. This is an intentional protection method to avoid further data loss or corruption, eg users continuing to use the system in the belief their work is being saved when it might not be. Staff at HOPS's offices and outposts were immediately aware of the problem and all technical resources were diverted to attending to this issue straight away. In a situation like this we are conscious of the need to balance time spent investigating the issue with a view to fixing it against the need to restore services. We spent an initial 30 minutes attempting to deal with the issue, but at 3.50, after 30 minutes where no success was achieved, we abandoned that approach and decided to restore from the hourly backups in order to get services up and running again. It is possible that further time spent on the database could have yielded results, but it would be impossible to predict how long that would take and the system would be down throughout that time. HOPS takes backups of the data every hour for just such a failure as this, and the 1500 (GMT) backup, which was the most recent before the failure, was selected for restoration. This process, and the availability of backups in general, was tested very recently (on Christmas Day 2022) as part of our routine checks and assurance that disaster recovery processes are appropriate and working correctly. You can read more about HOPS's backup processes here: https://www.hops.org.uk/terms.php?t=b Once the 3pm backup was obtained and restored, some small tests and checks were carried out to ensure everything was ok, services started to become available again from 4.30pm, and were restored to all users by 4.45pm. Updates were posted on HOPS Facebook and HOPS Twitter throughout the incident, as is our standard practice in times of service disruption. https://www.facebook.com/HeritageOps https://www.twitter.com/HeritageOps Thank you to everyone who kept up to date with progress via those channels. I am pleased to say that the backup regime saved the day and limited the amount of work that was lost to only 16 minutes, however I am sorry for the fact of this incident occurring in the first place, and that 16 minutes of work was lost. It is safe to re-enter data that was entered during that time. If critical data has been lost that can't be re-obtained to be re-entered, please contact us as we MAY be able to obtain it from the original database. There is no risk of data having been 'leaked' or 'hacked' or any unauthorised access. HOPS was offline for approximately 70 minutes. Uptime for the last 12 months is 99.9857 % We have not yet established the original cause of the issue, but have preserved what evidence we can to potentially enable us to still do so. Some evidence will have been lost when we turned our attention to restoring from backups. We will give some attention to the original cause after a period to allow the dust to settle. Thank you to everyone for your patience, and thank you to HOPS staff who worked hard throughout to resume normal service. I'm sorry again for the inconvenience to all users this afternoon, and we thank you for the messages of support that we have received in the last couple of hours. If there are any queries or issues please contact us via the normal channels. Thank you.