The forum stopped working. Post to the hosting. They asked do we want to move to another server. We said it's okay, if it necessary. Moved and NO POSTS for around 2 months! Started to ask them what's wrong, why they lost so much data?! They said they'll check the logs and... already many days nothing. The tickets are "on hold". My last backup is probably few months ago and it will not working. "Repair database" - done, but not working. Google cache -- cashed only a few posts, so not that useful. Any other ideas (except it's time to find a more responsible hosting)?
The history:
Hello! In the recent ~48 hours we got non-stop the 503 error: "503
Service Unavailable
I apologize for any delay you experienced. Would you like to change the server?
Hello! Of course, if it's necessary it's OK to change the server.
Best regards!
Hello!
We agreed to move to another server. Now it's working, but there is a lot of missing data (from the last 2 months). Is it something temporary?
AFTER THIS -- many more messages/tickets, mails and feedback messages, but nothing happened... So, I need to know is there a way a person alone, without the hosting help to do it?
Your host moved you to another server, in order to do that they would need to either use a backup that already existed or make a new one first. I find it odd, and suspicious, if the first thing they do is suggest changing servers... That's always a bit of a risk, and if something really is wrong when doing the transfer - even more so. Did they use an old backup, or did they perhaps make an incomplete backup of what was on the server at the time - or did the move just fail somehow, we can't really know. Sorry to say, this would very much be your hosts responsibility to explain.
Yet another good reminder of the importance of backups though.
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Yet another good reminder of the importance of backups though.
Absolutely, and more importantly make sure those backups are YOUR backups.
Take your own. Regularly. A cron job on my host sends a DB backup every 4 hours to one of my home servers.
I do Plesk snapshots once a day, those are in a format where I can just extract complete folder structures and databases with 7zip if I need to, and can then transfer them on any platform I wish. Haven't needed these, never ever, but still I think it's a very good practice and I keep doing it.
Quote from: Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen on November 02, 2019, 04:33:34 AM
I do Plesk snapshots once a day, those are in a format where I can just extract complete folder structures and databases with 7zip if I need to, and can then transfer them on any platform I wish. Haven't needed these, never ever, but still I think it's a very good practice and I keep doing it.
I would periodically test that you can restore them. No one wants to rely on a backup only to discover it doesn't work.
Quote from: Arantor on November 02, 2019, 11:15:52 AM
Quote from: Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen on November 02, 2019, 04:33:34 AM
I do Plesk snapshots once a day, those are in a format where I can just extract complete folder structures and databases with 7zip if I need to, and can then transfer them on any platform I wish. Haven't needed these, never ever, but still I think it's a very good practice and I keep doing it.
I would periodically test that you can restore them. No one wants to rely on a backup only to discover it doesn't work.
I don't use the incrementals, and haven't seen any issues with any full backup I've extracted before - any specific reason for the warning? ( I mean, they are simply a compressed archive of the server contents. )
I've had to recover too many times from "we have a backup" when in fact the backup was worthless. A backup is not a backup until you prove you can restore from it.
Well, that's fair and true :)
They just stopped answering. We sent them a few more: tickets, emails and support messages. I do agree that in future we need a daily or hourly backup. No more trust...
And still, are there some source online (like full cache) where we can find all these missing posts of the last ~2 months? Any ideas?
Might be worth trying to find the old posts via archive.org (if archive.org indexed all of the boards and topics from your forum in the last 2 months, which is very unlikely), but you'd have to add those posts manually. They don't do database backups, their crawlers just crawl the site and take snapshost of threads, just like any other search engine crawler, that's it.
Yes, but there aren't enough. Tried it already.
I'm paying a bit extra for automatic backups. Everyday it does a database backup AND complete backup of the entire forum. I learned my lesson on that, like arantor said.
This could easily be done with cron jobs, even if no automatic backup option is available on your host's control panel ;). If you have a cron jobs option in you CP, you can do it yourself, no need to pay extra ;).
I also suggest downloading a copy of your backups at least once a month to your pc as well.
^^^ Agreed ;).