Great Dataclysm

The "Great Dataclysm" (named after the Great Cataclysm in BIONICLE) was the event in which over two years' worth of BZPB posts - March 31, 2008 to April 25, 2010 - were deleted by a hacker named "CrackJag" and the BZPower staff.

History
It all started when a hacker by the name of "CrackJag" hacked into BZPower's servers and caused chaos in an attempt to get revenge on the BZPower staff members for behaving like tyrannical assholes. While he wasn't exactly wrong about the staff members being tyrannical assholes, CrackJag's antics caused major damage to much of the BZPower forums, including the forum topic that BZPB was originally hosted in. Other topics related to BZPB, such as some of the original BZPB epics that were hosted on BZPower, were also affected.

In the first server crash, six months of posts were deleted. This was actually referred to in BZPB's plot and explained in-universe as Blackout using the Vahi Cube to rewind time by six months.

In a subsequent attack, the entirety of the BZPB topic was deleted save for around ten or so pages in the middle of the topic. Unfortunately, these pages were then permanently deleted when the BZPower staff made the decision to delete the forum archives and implement a newer version of forum software in order to prevent CrackJag from exploiting even more security vulnerabilities that may or may not have been present in the original forum software. We were not able to recover any surviving posts from the BZPB topic because none of us had the insight to save any in the Wayback Machine at the time.

BZPower's official statement (July 24, 2013)
Earlier this year we began to have some problems with our Archives, the instance of the old forums with all the posts from before the recent major upgrade. This was in part due to a malicious individual who deleted parts of the database as well as several backups that were stored on our server. The Administration has done our best to try to restore things, but there's still a lot of missing content that I'm afraid no longer exists. In addition, the software that keeps the archives running has become outdated and insecure, and may be part of how portions of the site were hacked recently. With all this in mind, we have made the decision to close down the Archives and move forward, focusing on our new forums and the future of BZPower. It was not an easy decision, but in the end, there was not much we could do. On behalf of the Administration, I'm truly sorry that we have to do this, but I'm hoping everyone can understand the reasons behind our decision. View the full article

Recovered data
The only BZPB-related data that we have been able to recover from the Dataclysm is a few pages of Endless Feud, the precursor to BZPB, and Dusk and Dawn, an epic written by User:Klak.

Data lost in the crash
All BZPB related posts and topics from March 31, 2008 to April 25, 2010 were lost forever, because none of us considered saving it in the Wayback Machine at the time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I guess...

This includes:
 * The BZPB RPG story arcs Beginning to Shadows Rising
 * BZPB: The Epic written by Kon
 * Stranded on Auroras written by JS
 * BZPB: Peace for our Time written by JS
 * BZPB: Strong World written by ???

A category for article subjects that appeared in topics or posts that were lost in the Dataclysm has also been created.