Info/Announcement Model Ship World Outage — Community Support and Update

[Jimsky]

Shipmates,

Many of you have likely heard by now about the situation with Model Ship World. It is a deeply unfortunate loss for our community, and I want to take a moment to address it directly.

First, let’s keep things in perspective. From everything we know, MSW itself was not specifically targeted. This appears to be part of a broader, large-scale attack affecting servers worldwide. MSW shared infrastructure with systems that were targeted, and as a result, it was caught in the blast radius.

The scale of the loss is hard to overstate. Years of build logs, research, photographs, and collective knowledge, all gone. Some of us have learned from, contributed to, or been inspired by that body of work. It is a tough moment for the entire ship modeling community. That said, if there is one thing this hobby has always proven, it’s resilience.

Model Ship World will return. It may not look the same at first, and the archives we relied on are gone, but the members, the real heart of the forum, are still very much here. And that’s what matters.

When MSW is rebuilt, I strongly encourage all of you to support them:

• Rejoin when the doors reopen
• Restart your logs if you can. You can simply copy your logs from here
• Share knowledge, photos, and experience
• Help rebuild what was lost, piece by piece

We all benefit from a strong, connected community. MSW has been a cornerstone of that for many years, and it deserves our support as it finds its footing again. In the meantime, let’s continue doing what we do here, building, sharing, and helping one another. And let’s keep our colleagues at MSW in mind as they take on the enormous task ahead.

We wish them steady winds and following seas.

— SOS Administration

 

[RolandR]

Unfortunately many model ship builders on the MSW have passed on and will not have their legacy preserved and there knowledge is now gone for ever, if they have not been a member of another forum.

It might be a good idea for Ship of Scale members with knowledge of those members to prepare a list.

Get a external drive and back up frequently all your files and store the drive outside your house. Don't use the Cloud as your backup.

 

[Jimsky]

Don't use the Cloud as your backup.

... as your only backup!

 

[rtwpsom2]

You need three backups. One local, as in a backup on the same server or hosted by the provider. One online, the cloud backup, this one is on a different server or a dedicated server. And one you keep on a storage device in your home or office that is not connected to the internet except when backing up. The source for this is my good friend Tract who does this kind of thing for a living.

 

[DARIVS ARCHITECTVS]

Wow. Glad I posted my build logs here. The copy of my first build log was destroyed on MSW not by hackers, but by an overzealous admin from the "Keep it Real" crowd for specious reasons. That fellow is no longer there thanks to a founder of that forum. My condolences for members who lost so much more at MSW.

 

[serikoff]

This is a huge loss for our hobby. I also had a large forum in Ukraine, and due to the war, it was destroyed, and all the reviews (photos) were lost. So I know what it's like. That's why I duplicate all the information many times. I've been to MSW and other forums, and here, too, and I have a new website with my reviews where I'm transferring the information from the old one. So I'll be one of those who will add to the knowledge base, and I highly recommend everyone join... There aren't many of us in the world as it is, and there's even less well-structured information, especially for beginners. I agree with the advice... save photos on an external drive, and keep review descriptions in text format for the fastest possible recovery.

After the night always comes the dawn!

 

[Kimosubby]

Words fail me, and to lose the backups as well. Let's hope lessons are learnt from this event.
I have several external hard drives which I use for my own backup, and they are only connected and accessed when I have data to load to them. I've never truly trusted the "cloud" where ever that is. It always claims it is safe and secure, and comes at a cost for some applications eg. Apple backup etc.

I think I'll get another couple of SSD drives, big ones...