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

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by MichaelRoss

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.

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

[Dien Rice]

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