Hello everyone, this morning my VPS rolled back four years. I found the whole system stuck at 2022. Until 6 p.m. yesterday everything worked perfectly. Then, suddenly, without anyone doing anything, the databases, the sites that were running on it, the operating system, the files – everything reverted to 2022. I have an automatic backup service that makes a backup at 00:01 each day. I tried to restore today’s July 9 backup, but after receiving the confirmation email and logging in via SSH I still found everything stuck at 2022.
My backup plan keeps only the last seven backups (one per day) and, inexplicably, a 2022 backup appeared in the list of existing backups. It clearly shouldn’t be there and it looks like the system is locked onto that backup.
I called support – truly disgraceful: English only and a 45‑minute wait – and they told me a security update was applied during the night. After explaining all the attempts I’d made to fix the situation (restoring various backups, reboots, reboots in rescue mode, etc.), they told me to keep trying the same things over and over, which of course had no effect. The server is still stuck at 2022 and there’s no way to restore the recent backup.
Has anyone had a similar problem? How do you solve it? Support doesn’t care!
When I open the ticket, I see that it was updated on 10.07.2026 at 18:00:44, but there are no updates in the ticket and I haven’t received any email about it. Can anyone explain what a ticket update might mean when there’s no message inside? Thanks.
Sometimes agents update the status internally when assigning the ticket to another department or when reviewing it. I suppose it’s because they are working on it.
I hope they are working on it also because there are active automatic backups that keep only the last seven. Unfortunately, the backup cannot be stopped. I tried, but it says to wait until the end of the month. My fear is that if a solution is found, the backups will already have been destroyed.
This incompetence and lack of timeliness for such a serious error on their part really leaves me very perplexed. OVH is the biggest European provider.
I hope for you that it isn’t a virtual machine that had a snapshot taken four years ago.
After a snapshot, the file containing the VPS’s hard drive stays frozen, and all operations performed on the VPS are written to a second file, which acts a bit like a transparent overlay. Without the overlay you see the frozen situation at the time of the snapshot. With the overlay you see the current situation.
To be able to get back to the current situation, you obviously need both files. If for whatever reason you managed to “work” on the frozen disk four years ago, the overlay would no longer be of any use.
OVH absolutely needs to get its hands on the full set of files that make up the virtual machine.
In any case, this confirms that you always need a second backup solution.
OVH snapshots to be able to restore the VM, and a copy of the files on another service/server.
Good luck, it’s an extremely rare incident, and I hope OVH can help you out!
And it also confirms that, whatever the actor, as soon as you’re sure about the virtual side, well, you can’t really guarantee anything because you don’t know how it’s managed behind the scenes.
Anyway, in IT it’s hard to have an absolute guarantee...
Edit: I’m eagerly awaiting the reboot of one of my OVH VPSes that contains some rather sensitive stuff.
Thank you all for your interest, I really appreciate it a lot.
According to OVH, this should be due to the fact that a backup was mounted years ago (I don’t even remember why) and since then we have “written data” to the backup while the virtual machine remained stuck at 2022.
This leaves me very puzzled and it seems they just want to close the case because, as the guides also state, the backup is ADDED to the virtual machine and does NOT REPLACE the disk. So I don’t understand how, for example, MySQL could have suddenly decided to stop using the files in /var/lib/mysql and start using the files in /mnt/mybackupmountpoint/var/lib/mysql.
They also say that unmounting the backup caused the rollback to 2022. Unfortunately, the backup was unmounted AFTER the rollback to 2022 while trying to recover files from another backup.
I think something went wrong in those layers that @fritz2cat mentions and they are now trying to dump everything on me. After all, they are a powerhouse that revenues €3 billion a year, and I’m a poor guy who couldn’t afford to deal with such a technical audit.
I agree with @TTY and @Sich: a disaster‑recovery plan is required here in Italy by law, especially when certain types of data are involved. I’ve been trying for years to convince my client, the data owner, to implement one, and just as he finally agreed, everything fell apart. Quite a streak of bad luck.
From the way they answer both the ticket and the phone, I don’t think anything can be recovered.
In the OVH client area, when I mount a backup I see the backup indicated as “mounted” and on my VPS, via lsblk, I see the new volume that I can mount at /mnt/mymountpoint.
It wouldn’t make sense for a backup to replace the live system because the mount is meant to recover files. How could I recover them if the live system is “under” my backup and is inaccessible?
In any case, OVH’s documentation on using backups states that the backup sits alongside the live system and does not replace it.
Thanks for your reply @LibreMaster but that’s not the case. The system was working until yesterday and has reverted to 2022 without any action on my part.
In my OVH account the daily backups are present, but they have all reverted to 2022.
The problem is that an administrator needs to actually check the backup version and see if there is still one from 2026 before the next three days.
We also need to verify that the entire system is indeed from 2022—the OS version, some system files, and which files are used by the database. There should be no doubt about this before even contacting OVH.
Phew, this story is completely insane! I sincerely sympathize... If something like that happened to me, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
It clearly shows that you should always invest in external backup services. Sure, it comes with a cost, but that’s the price to pay for peace of mind.
Does your system keep running even with the 2022 version? Because if that’s the case, it will recreate new data over old ones... If you then have to merge everything the day you retrieve the right backup, what a nightmare!
