[admin (no pm's please)]

This is also a cautionary tail!

Backing up forums is very important to us, and has been a major area of work since day one.

Some months ago we were having problems, we were using a 1&1 web server that whilst we had no issues with corrupt backups, the server was doomed to crash every week or so. 1&1 were as useful as you might expect...

So something needed to be done, one of our members suggested using straight shared hosting   This went against all my better judgment, but the financial argument was compelling, we would have £100s a year, and that makes a big different around here.

Until last week things went reasonably well, the backups succeeded, were validated and were used to restore forums. In fact last week I even paid for an extra account to create more backup space.

At which instant (did our account get reviewed and nobbled? I wonder?) it all went wrong, we started to get hit with cpu limits when trying to validate or extract data from backups By transferring some backups off the system we have established the backups are valid, but you simply can't leave such questions open to faith

The upshot is that Thursday we started renting a new dedicated server for the backup system. The new system has plenty of space, and might even end up with the myff gallery system being installed on it.

I'm taking the opportunity to write more backup management code, which will include using the useless godaddy shared hosting accounts as additional offsite backup storage.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I'd like to emphasis that our backups have always been good, much better than is typical in this industry.

All the same I'm feeling pretty pleased with the new system, at any one time there are now in effect at least 4 copies of peoples daily forum database.

1) The RAID system (purists including me will say that this should not count, but hey I'm bragging   )
2) A copy on the backup server.
3) A copy on a shared hosting account.
4) The shared hosting providers backup system (which one would hope is more than a single copy).

The backups go through an automatic validation check on the backup server and in the case of database backups an aging process will keep backups for 12 weeks.

It is also the case that the backup server is security isolated. e.g. if a main server was compromised you cannot use it to wipe backups on the backup server, and if the backup server was compromised it could not be used to hit a main server.