Hello everyone,

I would like to apologize for keeping you in the dark. You probably noticed our website and forums were down and even though it’s early December, Linux Mint 17.3 isn’t officially out yet.

We’ve been hit by a series of disk issues on our main server and we made a critical mistake which resulted in data loss when trying to solve them. We then discovered our daily backups only covered part of what we lost…

We’re working day and night to recover the data and to bring everything back to normal.

The affected websites are http://www.linuxmint.com and http://forums.linuxmint.com. The server also had to be rebuilt, so we’re expecting traffic/load issues until it is tuned and issues related to email/uploads until it is properly configured.

Only files were lost, no databases. On the forums, this means all the posts, accounts, etc.. are there, but users might miss their avatar, signatures etc..

On the website it means 404 errors, missing screenshots and release notes, outdated pages..etc.

I’m confident we’ll recover pretty much everything. If something is permanently lost, we’ll rewrite it. It is possibly the worst moment for this to happen. We should be enjoying a new release right now but we can’t afford to announce it in these conditions.

We’ll get there of course, and I hope we won’t be long. I’m learning a lot from this setback. I’m really sorry this has happened, I can’t wait for us to get passed this situation so that we can resume our work on the distribution.