Have you ever started over because you lost a backup to your forum?

[Bawse]

I try to make sure I always have backups. It's extremely important, especially if your site has a ton of content/members.

I have lost my site in the past due to not taking regular backups, I'll never let it happen again.

Has it happened to you?

 

[Tracy]

No. Since I was in IT for years I was very aware of the importance of backups.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I try to make sure I always have backups. It's extremely important, especially if your site has a ton of content/members.

I have lost my site in the past due to not taking regular backups, I'll never let it happen again.

Has it happened to you?

I lost mt biggest forum because I made this mistake years ago.

It was also the forum I spent $1K+ to buy out the competition.

It was a big lesson to learn.

 

[Heatman]

I lost mt biggest forum because I made this mistake years ago.

It was also the forum I spent $1K+ to buy out the competition.

It was a big lesson to learn.

Damn! It would have been very difficult for you to get over such a mistake because when you remember everything you've invested and lost, it's going to be very frustrated. This is capable of making someone lose interest in running forums completely.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Damn! It would have been very difficult for you to get over such a mistake because when you remember everything you've invested and lost, it's going to be very frustrated. This is capable of making someone lose interest in running forums completely.

It helped me make a decision to quit forums for a while.

Now I back everything up but I also have no interest in buying forums.

 

[Heatman]

It helped me make a decision to quit forums for a while.

Now I back everything up but I also have no interest in buying forums.

This is exactly like when they say experience is the best teacher because you're never going to forget what you passed through quickly.

 

[Tracy]

This is exactly like when they say experience is the best teacher because you're never going to forget what you passed through quickly.

Sadly, there are a wealth of people that don't want to listen to those that have been through that experience, both in the website admin world and also the business world.
Once clinic I did work for kept putting off getting the software I kept recommending for the backup of their servers for onsite backups in addition to the off-site that they were doing. They got hit with a ransomware attack and it took them 3 days of being closed (2 of that restoring over the slow ISP internet provider they had) and $7500 to an outside vendor to do the restore for them for the servers and 3 days of my reinstalling their desktops (which they did not have to pay for as I did it for free). They already had equipment on site that could have stored the backups. They just didn't want to spend the $2000'ish for it to protect their whole computer infrastructure.

 

[Heatman]

Sadly, there are a wealth of people that don't want to listen to those that have been through that experience, both in the website admin world and also the business world.
Once clinic I did work for kept putting off getting the software I kept recommending for the backup of their servers for onsite backups in addition to the off-site that they were doing. They got hit with a ransomware attack and it took them 3 days of being closed (2 of that restoring over the slow ISP internet provider they had) and $7500 to an outside vendor to do the restore for them for the servers and 3 days of my reinstalling their desktops (which they did not have to pay for as I did it for free). They already had equipment on site that could have stored the backups. They just didn't want to spend the $2000'ish for it to protect their whole computer infrastructure.

It's being penny wise and pound foolish. They didn't want to pay $2k but ended up playing nearly $8k. Next time, they will take some technical suggestions serious.

 

[Tracy]

Next time, they will take some technical suggestions serious.

They did shortly after that. There is now local storage on site for backups also. They also get pushed out over the net to a remote site for disaster recovery.
Both owners are getting up around 70 now and they are looking at either selling and retiring or possibly hiring staff that can take over and they come in once a week to sign off on what they need to. So I can see where they are not really that interested in sinking a lot of money into the computer infrastructure because if they sell, odds are the buyers will be a larger group that use a different web based software that is popular in this area.

 

[frm]

Yes, but I'm sure everyone has heard my most recent story of RS after launch.

Plesk decided to be cute and upgrade MySQL, and in the process, convert my InnoDB databases to MySQL8, which it failed at doing, corrupting them beyond being scattered bits and bytes with pieces of human readable text (with some ASCII scattered in). However, I was able to reconstruct about 40% (could have been 60%+ with more time) with uploading xf_thread. xf_post. and xf_user (and a few other) IDB files to ChatGPT to break out anything human readable, telling it that it was a XenForo forum table, and to reconstruct MySQL queries needed to rebuild the database as complete as possible.

It could do 40%, which was the main content, but I could push it to 60% if I kept working with it. However, it didn't seem to like putting some posts in the correct order, especially the forum games. So, that would've been manual queries to run for each post above 40%, when it was easier just to start the game over.