very early this morning, i wrote:
just before midnight in cambridge, a serious incident happened on the cambridge ctan node, resulting in the loss of much of the macros/latex/contrib tree. because of the nature of the incident, the losses propagated to the other ctan sites.
i have since then been doggedly restoring stuff from backups (not easy, since it involves juggling files across three machines), but at 0530, i'm starting to fail.
i've made quite a lot of headway, but there is stil much to do -- i shall restart when i've had a bit of sleep.
apologies to one and all.
with much help from rainer schoepf, the ctan central archives are now entirely restored.
i went to sleep last night turning over schemes to avoid this sort of thing in future, but i am of the opinion that while this particular problem should be avoidable, there are in general no absolute guarantees.
i have for some time been designing a new archive setup for cambridge. i have added one new requirement, today: that recovery from backup should be easier (and hence faster) than i found it last night.
once again, please accept my apologies for the troubles.
Robin Fairbairns
For the CTAN team