Serious error

[CTAN Announcements]

very early this morning, i wrote:

> just before midnight in cambridge, a serious incident happened on the
> cambridge ctan node, resulting in the loss of much of the
> macros/latex/contrib tree.  because of the nature of the incident, the
> losses propagated to the other ctan sites.
> 
> i have since then been doggedly restoring stuff from backups (not easy,
> since it involves juggling files across three machines), but at 0530,
> i'm starting to fail.
> 
> i've made quite a lot of headway, but there is stil much to do -- i
> shall restart when i've had a bit of sleep.
> 
> apologies to one and all.

with much help from rainer schoepf, the ctan central archives are now
entirely restored.

i went to sleep last night turning over schemes to avoid this sort of
thing in future, but i am of the opinion that while this particular
problem should be avoidable, there are in general no absolute
guarantees.

i have for some time been designing a new archive setup for cambridge.
i have added one new requirement, today: that recovery from backup
should be easier (and hence faster) than i found it last night.

once again, please accept my apologies for the troubles.

Robin Fairbairns

For the CTAN team