25 minutes ago: It should be back for good (I'm not jinxing us am I?). Cliff made some changes to the new machine to help with the stability and it looks like this one will stick.

9 hours ago: Yes, the new machine is just a tad shy and experiencing some stage-fright. We're spending some time this morning trying to boost the little fella's confidence and get him (or is it a her) back out on stage for all of you to enjoy...

1 day ago: The file transfer is done. Now there's some cleanup and testing to do...but there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

1 day ago: We're down to the last 70 gigs or so of transfer. Obviously this pushes the final fix date out another day or two (since it's now midnight).

3 days ago: Looking into it.

3 days ago: So during the course of this crisis we've had chat introduced along with the revamped "my updates" (new and improved and no longer slowing down the site!)

Meanwhile, images chugs along.

The latest: The sheer number of image files being copied over are so massive that it's taking much longer than we initially anticipated. We passed the halfway point earlier today. We expect another 1-2 days to finish the copying.

Don't hold your breath or hold me to it...but we're shooting for this Wednesday to have everything back. That's the goal. I'll update you if that changes.

4 days ago: The copying has taken longer than anticipated. We took some steps to speed it up on Sunday. I'll have a better update for you in a few hours.

5 days ago: Wow this is tough...changes every week. So for this week I'll say:

1. I'm Only Sleeping
2. Yesterday
3. Nowhere Man

6 days ago: So latest update:

Last of the hardware was put into our server facility yesterday and we began transferring the backup image data from hard disk to the new image server.

Right now we're just waiting for a HUGE amount of data to finish transferring to the new machine. I know we originally estimated Friday, but we underestimated the file transfer time from disk to new server. Once that's done, we're *close* to being ready to reinstate the missing images (we may just need to do some brief testing to make sure everything's working properly).

So please be patient for just a little while longer. We're in the home stretch now. It may take some time for the transfer to finish because there are A LOT of files being moved onto the new image machine.

But we have tried to deal with everything as quickly as possible with this outage.

7 days ago: it's coming along. we're at the facility where our machines are housed. been moving equipment around and installing the new hardware all night.

tomorrow we'll be moving the images to the new machine and setting up the new machine so it can be used by the fanpop population.

that's it for now...we're all very tired :-)