massive crash at fireservice.co.uk - could it happen here?

falkor · 2004-11-24 11:34:46

imagine getting this email through ......

First of all please accept our apologies for the recent downtime. I am also not sure if this email will reach you.
On the 1st November we suffered a loss which resulted in losing the databse of the forum. To cut a long story short we installed a new forum at the request of many members on the 8th November which meant that users had to rejoin. I have just got back the lost database which has allowed me to email all those members on the old forum to let you know that you will need to rejoin the new forum. If you have rejoined since the 8th November, please ignore this email.
Forum can be found http://www.fireservice.co.uk/forum]http … o.uk/forum

what a nightmare ALL USERS HAD TO REJOIN? THE ENTIRE DATABASE CRASHED AND BURNED? (well it didn't 'burn' it turned up later floating down the swanny)

Well, what a fortnight. If your reading this then you are looking at our new forum on a new server with a new host. I will try to explain the events of the last week as simply as possible.
On the 1st November 2004 the site went offline due to a server error with our hosts. This resulted in the loss of all services to many sites, this one included.
I was then given several choices. I could either wait until full service resumed, but there was no timescale as the server had crashed again and again due to a hardware fault. The server was due to be replaced with a more upto date server within 6 months anyway.
I was then offered the opportunity to move the site complete to a new server but the database for the forum lay on the old server. Moving the site itself wasnt a problem, as I wrote it, and therefore have it on my own PC.
I decided to take the plunge and move onto a new server and wait until the database was made available to upload back into the forum, still no time scale on when. This we did after ammending over 200 web pages to meet the new server requirements.
Once on the new server we encountered several problems and we set up a temporary forum to guage the views of members. I collated those, and from what was said, most members were happy to start a whole new forum, despite losing 600 members and 14,000 posts. We discussed that the majority would return as regulars anyway. We still encountered further problems which seemed to get dealt with very slowly due to the amount of sites that were affected. The fact that I had the site back up and running meant we were not a priority.
I then noticed that we were using 20% of the monthly bandwidth in one day and this would result in expensive hosting costs on the new server. During the downtime we received a few donations, one being quite substantial.
I then decided in the interests of the forums future that we would move the hosting to a new company and transfer the domain name also. This resulted in a second move to a complete new server and transfer of the new forum database.
The reason I had to close the forum for a second time was so that I could back up all the members and posts and transfer them onto the forum you now find yourself on. If i had taken a backup and then left the forum open, new members and posts posted after the backup would not have been transferred across.
I hope this explains it a little better to those regular members who wondered why we was offline. All i can do is apologise for the downtime the site has suffered as it was beyond my control.
Thanks to all for the emails of support during the downtime.

the thing is, forum crashes DO HAPPEN

website crashes DO HAPPEN

it's just a fact of life, we have to accept it - but at least "somewhere" there is a back up of the database and the above quoted 'bleating' shows that - EVEN WITH a back up, things are not always that easy to restart from a crash

in fact the http://www.fireservice.co.uk/forum]http … o.uk/forum - following a serious system crash - have decided to go with a brand NEW forum!! all members REJOIN!?

COULD IT HAPPEN ON NEWMARS?

Josh Cryer · 2004-11-24 11:39:40

Not with quarterly backups.

falkor · 2004-11-25 05:41:18

Josh, this is an interesting subject, thanks for the reply

"quarterly back ups" ?

so you are saying that the maximum damage possible, after a crash to these forums, would be the loss of 3 months of topics? have I got that right?

when fireservice.co.uk crashed, they eventually got the back up from their host, BUT IT WASN'T COMPATIBLE with the new server they contracted to what a conundrum

GraemeSkinner · 2004-11-30 02:07:46

How much data are we talking about backing up for the whole of New Mars say?

Graeme

Josh Cryer · 2006-01-07 00:27:48

Right now, after just doing one, it's about 90MB, total. That's just for the forums. Another 4 megs or so for the wiki. It's really not that much.

And I went from quarterly to monthly backups. The server we have, though, seems to do daily ones, so if something happened to NewMars, functionality would be restored to the last day.

The only way absolute catastrophe could mess us up is if NewMars died, the hosts backups died, and my backups died. A highly unlikely scenario.

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#1 2004-11-24 11:34:46

Re: massive crash at fireservice.co.uk - could it happen here?

#2 2004-11-24 11:39:40

Re: massive crash at fireservice.co.uk - could it happen here?

#3 2004-11-25 05:41:18

Re: massive crash at fireservice.co.uk - could it happen here?

#4 2004-11-30 02:07:46

Re: massive crash at fireservice.co.uk - could it happen here?

#5 2006-01-07 00:27:48

Re: massive crash at fireservice.co.uk - could it happen here?

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