We just had a major crash... but on the bright side...
 

Thankfully, Sowpub seems to be back!

(The site has just been restored from a backup, thanks to my webhost...)

We've lost about 10 days of posts... But...

I do have copies of all those posts. I'll try to "repost" them in some form. They may not have the nice neat "threaded" look, but at least the content should be there...

(Restoring all these posts could take a week or so, since I have to do it manually... I hope to do some each day...)

Please let me know if you notice any other points I need to address...

Thanks!

Dien

Re: We just had a major crash... but on the bright side...
 

That explains why I couldn't bring up the forum.

10 days worth? Hmm... I don't see Any posts from November. It goes from October straight to December.

Question to ask your host... why don't they do Daily backups? Or do they but their backup data is corrupted.

Michael Ross

A silver lining?
 

Hi Michael,

Apparently what happened is the "raid card" in the computer hosting Sowpub failed, and they tried replacing it with other "raid cards", but that didn't work. So they had to move Sowpub.com to a whole new machine (so maybe there's a silver lining in there somewhere, since we're on a new machine!).

Here's the most recent post that was saved in the backup... It's from Dec. 4.

http://www.sowpub.com/forum/showthread.php?p=17916

With the restored posts, as you can see I can't post them with people's names in the header, but hopefully all the info will be in the post! (Also, if anyone edited their posts, I don't have the edited versions, only the versions that were originally posted.)

I don't know why my web host doesn't backup every day - but nowadays, apparently many web hosts don't back up at all! (Especially the low-cost ones.) By the way, I also have my own complete forum backup, but it's about 2 1/2 months old, so I'm just glad they had a more recent backup than I did! (Time to make a new backup!)

Best wishes,

Dien

How Sowpub is archived...
 

In case anyone is interested, the Sowpub forum is archived in 3 ways...

1. My web host does a regular backup. Sowpub is now running on a new computer, and the site has been restored from my web host's backup.

2. I do my own backups of the database that the forum is based on. At worst, I could "recreate" the forum from this backup. (However, I should do these backups more often, as my most recent one was from about 2 1/2 months ago! I plan to do another backup in the coming week...)

3. I also have an "email archive" of all recent posts, as they are posted. (This only includes what a post looks like when it's first posted - so any later editing is isn't included.) It's from this archive that I'm putting up the "restored" posts...

It's good to be a little paranoid, sometimes, just to be safe... :)

I guess a good "lesson" in this is - it's good to have backups (even multiple backups) if you do any kind of work using computers!

Cheers,

Dien

Re: We just had a major crash... but on the bright side...
 

Dien,

Bet a few Sowpubber's thought that their IP address and Sowpub membership was being Blocked... :)

Since Sowpubs has had some recent Attacks and Crashes you may want to give some thought to having a Dual Sowpub Forum concept... Maybe 2 Separate domain names and Hosting on independent servers or web hosts...

And on that note How about Double Listings in Google and some interesting Solutions for Duplicate Content...

For those that are Not already signed up to any Newsletters on Stompernet.... That have web businesses...

Make sure you Read, Watch and Listen to All of this High Quality FREE information... ;)
http://stomperblog.com/

Phil

Re: Unfortunately, we just had a major crash... but...
 

Dien a quick suggestion

Why not run a nightly crontab and send the zipped database to a gmail account?

A great insurance policy when you are using low cost hosting.

Re: Unfortunately, we just had a major crash... but...
 

Thanks for the suggestion... I know about cron jobs, but I've never really tried it out... I'll look into this!

Cheers,

Dien

Re: Unfortunately, we just had a major crash... but...
 

Hi, Dien - backing up the database to a zip sounds good - just make sure you've got enough space on your hosting account so you don't run into problems .....

:O)

Margaret

Re: We just had a major crash... but on the bright side...
 

Hi Phil,

That's not a bad idea... I may look into doing something like this in the future. :)

Best wishes,

Dien

All the recent missing posts have now been reposted (DNO)
 

(DNO = "Do Not Open", all the info is in the title.)