Is this forum reliably backed up?

[mucowag]

Is this forum reliably backed up?
It would be a tragedy if all this wonderful stuff was lost overnight.

Another much smaller forum where I am a mod, did lose an amount of posts
as the host's own backup program had a glitch, so never to be restored.

I did do a working backup, after the event (Using HTTP track), but it took
a few days on a small forum. This one could take weeks.
Are there any cotingency plans?

[rotobott]

Numerous sites have backed us up over the years, just changing the usernames to protect the not so innocent

[buttsie]

Thats been shown up 3-4 times with closing / hacked imagehosts multiple times
over the past 14 years

We no longer upload using attachments because 1 host died killing off a significant amount of content -

There was a cluster crash where 2 weeks of posts across the forum were completely lost
January 201? That wasnt retrieved


Given there are umpteen cloned versions of VEF which individuals have created by downloading VEF onto their own servers you could say we have numerous back-ups

I would guess the database minus the content is backed up in some form

[BlueShinobi]

Most hosts say they do things like full backups every two weeks or even more often. But in my experience, they mostly do differential backups indefinitely. The only time you get a full backup is when they upgrade/replace hardware. You may be 6+ months out without a full backup.

And differential backups have a pretty mediocre record of successful recovery. Especially in terms of the DB. If you get a 96% recovery, that's not too bad on the resources side. You can easily replace missing menu buttons or whatever. But a 5% corrupt database is no different than a 100% corrupt database.

[Jenny48549]

Backups are run every day. The people that maintain this forum are professionals, it's not an amateur operation like it was in the past.

[Rommelbommel]

Originally Posted by mucowag

Is this forum reliably backed up?
It would be a tragedy if all this wonderful stuff was lost overnight.

Most, if not all content is hosted on other websites and VEF only contains links to it. In case everything goes wrong, users would have to repost their links and as many of them are already broken here (see the threads to report them), it wouldn't make much difference. Well yes, there would still be some work, but not the same if the content was hosted here directly.

[Jenny48549]

Originally Posted by Rommelbommel

Most, if not all content is hosted on other websites and VEF only contains links to it. In case everything goes wrong, users would have to repost their links and as many of them are already broken here (see the threads to report them), it wouldn't make much difference. Well yes, there would still be some work, but not the same if the content was hosted here directly.

It would make a lot of difference actually. I and several others that I know of have literally thousands of posts with live links here and all of those posts would have to be recreated manually by us to allow access to those live links.

That would take months so backing up regularly is a must. It's bad enough we lost 2 weeks one time and over a month due to a hack and that wasn't fun either.