Major Minecraft Setback with NetherByte

I was in the office this morning and got a note from Xyd about the Minecraft server having problems.  I was able to log into the admin console from the office and saw all sorts of errors of this sort:

[Server] WARN net.minecraft.server.v1_8_R2.ExceptionWorldConflict: Failed to check session lock for world located at ./world, aborting. Stop the server and delete the session.lock in this world to prevent further issues.

That is never a good sign.  The server had shut itself down, so I left it like that, opened a ticket for NetherByte about the problem, included a long stream of the error output, and went back to work.

When I got home from work I went in to the server admin page again to run a backup, just in case, then went in with WinSCP to copy it down to my local machine only to find the backup was just 1Kb in size.

My server directory was down to the bare minimum of files, what you get when you first start a Minecraft server.  No world to be seen, no nothing, just the logs and jars directories and the eula.txt file.  And I literally had to go set that to “true” again, one of the first steps of a server setup.

Meanwhile I had not seen a peep back in response from NetherByte, so I started looking around for server outage or other notifications from them.  My work on that front left me with the belief that NetherByte hasn’t updated anything since around March of this year.

So I am not sure if they are really a viable, ongoing concern at this point.

Needless to say, I am in the market for another hosting service unless I hear something substantial back from them, like why they wiped my directory.  Suggestions are welcome.

But things must move forward.  I happened to have copied the Monday night backup of the server to my local system.  I do that about once a week, and a good thing too as all the daily backups were missing from the server along with everything else.  So I set about restoring that.

I also went back to the default Minecraft server jar file.  We’ll stay away from mods for the time being I think, until things settle down.

So that went well enough.  Everything was set back to Monday night, but that wasn’t too far back.

And then I went to the nether and found everything gone.  All that paving of the nether I mentioned, it is no more.  A giant mass of cobblestone has gone missing.  All that was there was the original portal, right on top of that burning spot that set me on fire the first time I arrived there.

So all of that work was undone, highways of cobblestone going too and fro, all gone.  My little outpost in the desert, will I be able to find it again?  And I have no idea why the backup of the world-nether directory wasn’t in sync with the main world directory.  They both get backed up into the same .zip archive.

On the bright side, Skronk and Enaldi, who joined the server this past weekend have been away all week… and have never been to the nether… so at least this won’t impact them.

Addendum: Finally got a response from NetherByte, the sum total of which was, “Have you installed any malicious plugins recently?”

No response, on two tries, in asking why they wiped all my data.

As always, you get what you pay for.