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Arantor:
Which would lead to even more support issues as enough people have trouble with backups timing out as it is, and most server configurations would not support sending every attachment through the admin panel without hitting either the PHP or Apache timeouts. (cPanel runs its own web server and so has no such direct limitation)
Red G. Brown:
Which is what volume splitting is for, so you have smaller files that are more manageable to download without timeouts.
Arantor:
Sure, but either you prepare the volumes up front (which means doubling the data stored on disk while you download it), or you prepare it on the fly, which can lead to memory timeouts as people already experience when gzipping their content.
Ideally, SMF needs to have the entire backup code ripped out and rewritten from scratch to support this kind of thing though that's clearly not going to happen prior to 2.1 at the very earliest.
Red G. Brown:
I think it would be really cool if SMF could figure out a way to "chunk" it's database, so older bits of it get stored separately from newer bits. That way, you wouldn't have to backup the entire thing every time, just the parts that have changed. Of course, that leads into the idea of diffs and deltas, which may not be used directly, but could provide some models for simplified techniques to achieve something similar.
On low to moderate traffic forums, it becomes feasible to email a backup every day automatically. Wouldn't that be cool?
Arantor:
I'd hate to get that by email every day when there are much more efficient ways of doing it, like automating a scheduled task on my PC... like I already do now, but that's just me.
The problem with deltas is that to restore the database you have to rebuild it incrementally rather than a single restore motion, and I'd personally hesitate to build such an option for users that will inevitably get it wrong, which is why I abandoned development of so many mods over the time I was modding, knowing the support issues, so ultimately I'd suggest SMF not take that course as a standard feature personally.
It's not impossible to chunk, of course, just the restoration is sufficiently complicated it would confuse most users here, I think, knowing the number of times I got fed up with people who didn't even read what was put in front of them multiple times in large red letters. That said, it gives me an idea for the other thing I'm working on...
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