Attention!!! Time Warp!!

[RC Storick]

OK here is what has happened? In Utah where the server is the air-conditioning for the servers went down. It caused about a 100 servers to melt down. I have been on the phone all day (and I do mean All day!) to straighten this problem out. After they got the SQL servers up and running it had corrupted our data base.

Blame me for forgetting to take a backup this month. I took it last month and we lost some DATA. I apologize and will try to run a cron job more often. We have now shrunk but a 150 members. If you are one of the late arrivals please re register. A huge mistake and disaster that happened. Fortunately I had the foresight to at lease back up some. Once again I apologize for not enough diligence, but all was not lost.

[Randy Powell]

Hi Robert,

Well, that explained what happened to my profile topic. Hey, sh&t happens.

[Mark Scarborough]

yeah and the avenger one too and lots of others, I think it was the servers protesting you beign gone to warmer climates Randy

[Matt Colan]

I lost my other profile due to the crash so I reregistered myself.  But this stuff happens to the best of us.

[FLOYD CARTER]

Nothing good ever happens in Utah!

Floyd

[Chris McMillin]

Floyd,
What is that supposed to mean?
Chris...

[Steve Helmick]

I discovered a few weeks ago that there are archiving web crawlers that might just save our collective bacon. What I don't have is the link to that site. Maybe somebody with more computer savy would be able to help out. With luck, it might be possible to reconstruct what has been lost, pasting it into what we still have intact.

I think this dangerous knowledge came about from Marek's thread, where he was looking for missing pages on the RO-Jett website, and somebody suggested this web crawler archiving thingy. At the time, I wondered how large a webpage would be, and happened to see a link to the page on the history of the various SIG Chipmunks. It's amazingly small. It would also make sense for us to make a copy of posts that were of some significance...I'm thinking about my Dr. Kevorkian Fueler thread, which seemed to me like a fairly significant project, writing and posting pictures and part numbers. I'll try to redo it when I have more time. But if you found a thread that you might want to bookmark, instead copy the whole thing onto your computer. You can then put it onto a disc or one of those remote hard drive gizmos. 

How to go about making a backup of the entire Stunthanger forum website is way beyond me, but I suspect it takes a specialized software and some disc space. I also think it would be a good idea to have the various forum moderators tasked with making backups of their forums on a weekly basis.  Steve

[Larrys4227]

How to go about making a backup of the entire Stunthanger forum website is way beyond me, but I suspect it takes a specialized software and some disc space.

The easiest way to do this is mentioned in Robert's first message in this thread. He simply forgot to run the cron job (it happens ...) to backup the forum.  Once run, it should be saved on another machine somewhere. Considering some of the info posted on SH, a more frequent backup than once a month may be in order. If the cron job is run, it wont be necessary for the moderators to backup their individual forums.

There may be crawlers out there that have archived the site, but I have no idea where. We'll probably just have to grin and bear with this ...  it happens to the best ...... but I bet it wont happen again!!

FlySafe!   Larry (Larrys4227)

[Serge_Krauss]

With numerous hours of work down the drain due to my own incomplete backup here, I'd like to see the lost stuff recovered too. sigh...

SK

[RC Storick]

Well with thousands of hours at this keyboard It doesn't look like thats happening. Sorry

PS we only lost a month! Could have been a lot worse.

[Rudy Taube]

Hi Robert,

You have done such an outstanding job for so long, that this little bump in the road is so small it does not even need to be mentioned! :-)

We are all just grateful that your excellent forum runs as smoothly as it does, 24/7/365. :-)

Regards, 

[John Hammonds]

PS we only lost a month! Could have been a lot worse.

Best month of my life..  Seriously, s**t happens. No problem, Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt with my home PC. Glad the rest is OK.

TTFN
John.

[Bill Little]

Hi Boss,

The problem is nothing to worry about, that's for certain!  Any knowledge that is gone can be posted again, if necessary.  If any of us had only the monitoring of the board to do, then someone might could complain.  But, having to put in some time on your day job keeps the bills paid!  (plus, you need time to build!)  Don't worry, we will all survive. 

Bill <><

[Guy Fuller]

BTW, the cron job could be set to automatic like every Saturday night at 12:00pm or something like that.  It's been awhile since I set up a cron but it seems like I remember that I could set a re-occurring time and day.  OTOH, the archiving thingie on the web, The Wayback Machine project, seems to be stalled or almost dead at the moment due to lack of funding.   Very novel concept but without the funding for the project - stalled.  The only other bad part of that project is it only took a snap-shot of a site to a certain depth like ten or twenty pages and didn't back up SQL or any image thought to be in copyright violation.

Other than a mirror site I think the best way to keep thing up and running smoothly is a cron on a weekly basis and unfortunately a mirror site would be more expensive along with the extra bit of programing it would take to re-direct if the main site were to go down.

There is a bunch of information on the Joomla forum and also the Virtumart forum about cron and how to apply it. Also, there is a tread in the SMF forums that leads to this http://hex.ro/wb/pages/projects/java-smf-backup-2.php not sure how well it works as my server is backed up locally in D.C. every Saturday night.  I thing the one in that link is worth looking into and I may do that for my site but so far the only time I've gone down is when my kid wants to play sys admin on his own server and purposely breaks it to find a way to fix it.

Hope this helps a little Robert as this site is one of the premier sites for modelers on the net.