Yesterday, we reported on the data centre in Russia that caught fire. While it may or may not have disrupted Google’s services, Rust, the video game, was a confirmed victim. At least, its players are, as days of progression were lost for some of them. Now, Rust producer Alistair McFarlane has shared a little bit on what transpired on his side of things.
PC Gamer reports that the Strasbourgh data center that caught fire hosted the Rust servers for the EU. 24 of the servers that went down held almost 10000 players each during peak hours. While it’s fair to say that the fire didn’t happen at such hours, a lot of players would have been inconvenienced by the time morning came.
Even the process of identifying affected servers was not easy. The process involved fighting for traffic with other people trying to log in to find information. And then came the issue of finding replacements. Ultimately, McFarlane had to settle for OVH Poland, which was about 1000km away from Strasbourg. The Facepunch team will be moving servers again in the coming weeks.
And while Rust had local and off-site backups, the latter did not involve player progression. The result was the aforementioned days of progress going up in flames, quite literally. But for what it’s worth, McFarlane said “lesson learnt”, pledging to have off-site player progression backups in the future.
