Important Notice: Do you use Filezilla? Avatars and Attachments lost?

[lastminute]

I use Filezilla

[autoreg]

Thanks for this interesting information. Really helpful

[Kimmel]

nice glitch, really!

that check box could be completely removed as it should transfer everything in BINARY until known extensions transfer in ASCII.

Consequentially this is a complete mess and got it all wrong 

So, it is enough to transfer all files in Binary and it will be alright?

[Red G. Brown]

This information should be on the forum backup page in the forum admin. This problem could be completely resolved if the forum backup function really did backup the forum, including attachments and avatars. Give it all to me, in one nice tar.gz. Simple, no caveats. The tricks only come when you have to extract the file and decide where to put the contents. That's easier to do than discovering you didn't actually have a correct and complete backup in the first place!

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

This information should be on the forum backup page in the forum admin.

Well, perhaps - but then again, this post is to support users of one specific FTP client, and it really isn't SMFs place to support 3rd party software IMO. Something general to remind about FTP backups, and how to transfer files could be done of course.

[Red G. Brown]

Right, I've complained about this before when I was surprised to find out the backup function didn't really do a backup. It just gave me bits and pieces, and I had to go hunt down the other bits and pieces separately before I had a full backup. That would be easy to fix, and would probably save a lot of forums.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Well, the point of the admin panel backup is, that it is a Database backup. And all you need to do to save an installation, with all of it's actual contents is the database backup. Agreed, that won't help you save attachments, avatars, themes etc, but for real emergency situations the DB is the biggest worry for most admins.

[crotalusco]

I made this mistake a year ago and am just finding this thread. Does anyone know if i re-upload all the attachment files under the new filezilla settings. replacing existing files if this will correct the images?

[kamkar]

I have shifted my forum from one host to another. [www.merapahadforum.com]

While I got all the post back but lost all my attacments. Yes I did use Filezilla.

After reading this thread I have unchecked the Filezilla setting as mentioned and downloaded all the attachements in my windows machine. I have uploaded all the attachments on my new host (deleting the old one) but I could not get them back.

Then I went to old host and create the tar backup using

tar -cvf att.tar /home/username/public_html/attachments

downloaded it using sftp and uploaded to new host. The result remained same. I have also done chmod 777 for attachment directory.

Am i missing something, somewhere.

I am using RC4

[kamkar]

I could sort it out. It was a file path related problem

[Alison Black]

Is filezilla truly a good ftp program to use, as I read somewhere that it can sometimes leave out some type of file, like pictures or something. I cannot remember the actual topic completely but it was something about images?

[AncientDragonfly]

I made this mistake a year ago and am just finding this thread. Does anyone know if i re-upload all the attachment files under the new filezilla settings. replacing existing files if this will correct the images?

If the files have been corrupted by an ASCII download, that is, if data has been stripped from them, it appears that there is no getting them back.  Uploading them with the correct settings will not restore the missing data.

If there is a piece of software which can restore the files that someone knows of, it would probably do a lot of people a big favor to post the name of it.

Is filezilla truly a good ftp program to use, as I read somewhere that it can sometimes leave out some type of file, like pictures or something. I cannot remember the actual topic completely but it was something about images?

Alison, go back and read this thread for the details.

I like Filezilla quite a bit as an ftp program, but it has to be configured correctly.  But then, all software must be configured correctly to work as one intends it to, unless it's a "one trick pony" kind of software.

[Arantor]

If there is a piece of software which can restore the files that someone knows of, it would probably do a lot of people a big favor to post the name of it.

There isn't, because it has no way of knowing the content of the original file to be restored. If there were some signature of the original file (md5 of the file contents), there's a chance but if you realise that for every instance of \r or \n in the file - and that's likely to be a lot in images, actually, there are 2 combinations, and those 2 combinations are exponential - so if there was a file with 10 original entries of either \r or \n, each of those is now an entry of \r\n, and you need to go through every combination, which is 2^10 = just 10 original values is 1024 combinations. 1024 combinations to try, calculate new signature, it's computationally expensive.

And there are usually a LOT more than 10 instances in a large file... often thousands. 2^1000 is a very large number.

[AncientDragonfly]

Theoretically, it could be done, like the NSA might do with Osama Bin Laden's encrypted files if they were to find them, but practically speaking, for the little guys (us), it's foolish to think about.  (Just an example, not meaning to start a political discussion.)  Your web host's backup, if there is one, is the best possibility.

* AncientDragonfly laughs at the whimisical idea of someone starting a distributed computing project, like Folding or SETI, to get their forum attachments and avatars back.

[Red G. Brown]

I still like the idea of SMF just giving people a real backup when it says it's giving people a backup in the administration panel. That ought to be plan A, if plan B is using the web host's backup, and plan C is becoming a terrorist leader so the NSA will repair your files for you.

[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...