As many of you know by know, on Wednesday the 20th the server's world became corrupted. The reason was linked to a network crash, which resulted in the hard drive the world is stored on to stop suddenly. Anyone who's played Minecraft for awhile knows that just stopping a world without saving chunks is a good way to lead to data corruption, and it happened in our case, though luckily in a small enough degree to let us still access the world.
The corruption itself has hit only two regions of the map [0.0.mca and 0.-1.mca, which translates to the area from 512x 512z to 512x -512z], leaving the rest of the world pretty much intact. Unfortunately a lot of our work is in this section of the map [like town and most of our houses] and the last backup we made was at the end of May. And as there is yet to be a way to repair chunks in Anvil, we have no real way of fixing it like the way it was at the moment.
This leaves us with the following options:
1) restart the world as is. The map was fairly playable except for chunks either being moved around or just deleted. These can be built around or over, but will most likely leave patchwork biome areas.
2) Revert to the May backup. This was almost a month ago, so a month's worth of work would be lost. We would only have to restore the two affected regions, so buildings outside of it should still be alright.
3) Start a new world using the old seed. The center areas of the map would be different, and things would have to be rebuilt, but areas outside the old world generation will be the same as on the old world.
4) Bring back the first map and expand on it. This is the idea I like most, though it'll take quite a bit of work. I have found that it's possible to exchange .mca files between worlds, though it tends to have not so pretty results. However, as the following pic shows, it's possible to make it almost seamless and still have all the features we want. The plan is to use the four central .mca files [which holds town and a few of our old houses], generate 1.0.0 land around it [to add the strongholds with End Portals] then replace the .mca files on the server with the ones made using this method.
Personally I like 4 the most. It would bring back a few players who stopped because all their work in the first world was "lost" to add in dungeons with Ender Portals. Also I blame KYA for making me miss my old house.