admin (no pm's please)
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Question for forum adminsIf you do a search on backups you can find out about our current backup regime, which is an extremely good one. If the unthinkable happens and despite the fact we run quality hardware on RAID5 systems, we did need to recover forums from backup, we could certainly say we have not skimped on the protection given to forums.
Having said that, backups are very expensive  When we buy new server kit there will be an opportunity to rethink how backups are done. So I'd like to ask the question.
If the unthinkable happened and due to a systems failure your forum had to be restored along with tons of others effected by the same problem, you would obviously be unhappy, but how old would the backup we restored from have to be before you thought we were sloppy in our backup standards?
Please be honest here, you are not going to be giving us the green light to reduce the backup level to the lowest acceptable standard.
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Daniel(u1bd2005)
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Well I don't have a current active forum with you guys at the moment. Though I have had a few where i've been admin/mod.
In my opinion though it would depend on how active a forum is as to how old a backup would be suitable in my opinion.
If a forum was really active for example (into the 100's of posts per day) then probably between 1-3 day old backup at the oldest in my opinion.
Where-as if the forum was less active then a back-up of upto 5-7 days might be suitable in my opinion.
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Bravo
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I was a regular on a non-MFF forum that actually had three crashes, and in all three cases the minimum backup was a month, and the worst one was around 6 weeks iirc. There were some cracking discusions that were lost in the ether, but it wasn't much more than a mild frustration in all cases. On one of the threads, I'd done a lot of research and contributed a good deal to the discussion, and I remember being a little disappointed that I wouldn't be able to link back to it in the future but we'd had the discussion anyway and no real harm was done.
So, I would say a month is fine in all honesty. At the end of the day you don't lose that much, though it would be a pain to someone who's forum is 3 and a half weeks old, but hey, sometimes life kicks you where it hurts...
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admin (no pm's please)
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Well people will be pleased to know that I consider a month to be totally unacceptable.
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query
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Even though the service you provide is free, I'd feel 'let down' and annoyed if I lost more than 24 hours worth of data, maybe less, depending upon the forum and it's activeness. Personally if I managed myff - I'll make some assumptions about data storage sizes here - I'd have it set up to backup 'constantly' and base that upon a forums size and activeness. So, I'd order the forums by their total posts per day, and they'd go first, starting from about 3am. It'd backup one forum at a time, taking a dump of the database and copying it over to a dedicated backup server, then once all the big forums are done I'd have it move onto the smaller forums. One forum at a time, limiting the amount of queries per second. I would also check if a forum has had any posts made in the previous 24 hours, if not, I'd skip it.
I don't have much experience with backing anything large up, only ever done around 20GB via RSYNC however this seems in theory a good idea. But yeah, not that you asked about my opinion on how :P I find anything over 24 hours to be unacceptable, with the low price of hard drives now, and servers, I'd expect nothing less. However this is a free service and you're probably not making enough to cover masses of backup methods.
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Myles
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My forum has games whereby people post predictions and bet virtual money on Serie A and Champions League games. So if the forum went down and predictions were lost obviously the forum would need to be backed up every hour inorder to get everyone's predictions and bets back. I would doubt every hour is a reasonable request, however i would like it backed up at least once per day, otherwise if the forum lost its' post for the last month it would loose all ongoing debates and discussions and it would only have discussions about football which are one month old and in football one month old discussions are ancient history. If the posts of the last 3 days were lost i believe my forum would loose it's integrity to the extent that the incident of all those posts being lost wouldn't be forgotten. I believe at least once per day would be needed to avoid loss of integrity, especially should the forums go down more than once, at least forumers would know that if it happens again at least they only loose 24 hours.
So in my opinion, it should be backed up at least once per day. Once per month would be totally unacceptable.
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Zudane
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I can see some ideas here that are good reasons for often back-ups.
Forums should never contain the only copy of something (besides discussion and what not), so that should be the most of what is lost.
I would have to say I'd prefer at least a daily back-up, but as more forums are added, that might be difficult. I'd be unhappy if the back-up was over 3-4 days old, and REALLY unhappy if it was over a week.
All in all I'd say 1-3 days old would be sufficient.
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Ask Mr. Religion
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Frankly, I would hate to lose anything given the highly verbose nature of my forum.
I would think that having at least the previous six months would be barely tolerable in the event of a disaster. Is there a way that the database can be made accessible so that a forum admin could keep their own backup copies? I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for this access to prevent loss of data, too.
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Zudane
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A copy of your own database would require an export, basically.
Currently I think it's set to every week, or multiple times a week. You wouldn't lose too much information if it did crash. But the current system allows for a fairly safe back-up already, so it's unlikely that you'd even lose that.
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admin (no pm's please)
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Currently is is every day, and always has been.
Actually lets be totally accurate one server does 6 days a week on the database, as the file system backup is divided into full and incremental and when the full backup occurs the performance hit is just too bad to cope with a database backup at the same time.
Not withstanding that there are many ways to do backups, backups are a big hit on the systems.
Please Zudane don't claim to have knowledge you don't. There never has been talk of weekly database backups as that has never been the case and your post may have given people cause for concern.
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admin (no pm's please)
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The next question is that currently backups are live causing no interruption to forums.
How grating would it be if when you tried to access your forum it might have 5 minutes when it was displaying a:
"This forum will be available momentarily, please be patient whilst a backup takes place"
message. This would generally be in the early hours of the morning, though of course globally your morning may vary!
How awful would you find it if you didn't even get a message, the service was simply dead for a few minutes?
I ask because the system will probably be changing massively internally over the next 6 months (though the only thing you should notice is a change of server blip for 48 hours and then a faster forum) and effective backup systems are a problem with no totally ideal solution  Very probably backups will stay almost exactly as they are, but work more quickly with less impact  But as I say with things changing it is a good time to look over the alternatives and gauge peoples views.
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Lynne
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Hi, I would be utterly depressed if a backup was more than 24 hours as my forum is hugely active. I have had a couple of instances at around the 8.30am mark where there has been very temporary inavailability...the forum members go into spasms if they can't get their fix. However, I would not mind it being down for a little while to allow for backups if it meant the full content was restored at the end of it.
I love this provision and find it hugely beneficial, so anything to help is worth it
Lynne
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admin (no pm's please)
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8.30am does sound like the backup system taking its toll, one of those things worth living with when you consider the benefit. All the same something I hope will be better with the new systems in place.
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query
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| admin (no pm's please) wrote: |
Not withstanding that there are many ways to do backups, backups are a big hit on the systems.
Please Zudane don't claim to have knowledge you don't. There never has been talk of weekly database backups as that has never been the case and your post may have given people cause for concern. |
Depends, really. How do you do backups at the moment? Is it simply taking an entire dump of every forum and moving it over to your backup server? Mind, I assume you've already streamlined the process as much as possible, but there could always be something you've missed  Personally, I'd be interested to see you set up a "myff backup service". For about £10 a month, users get access to an account on a separate server, they're allowed to log in and select "Backup my forum!", this option triggers a process on the main server which the server runs, the process copies the contents of the database and uploads it to the backup server. This means users can select when to backup their data, it would remove
During the process, their forum is automatically change to display their message, something like "We're quickly doing some maintenance, we should be back in a minute or 2!" then when the backup is completed the forum is restored to normal access. You would probably need to limit users to 2 backups a day so they don't purposefully mess with the system, but if you build a basic queueing system, you could have an excellent backup process.
In fact, you could do this for all forums. Each user gets access to the system, from there they can opt to backup their forum. If they're a free user, they're limited to one backup every 24 hours, if they pay they can take 2/3. Backups are taken every 48 hours though, automatically, so if a user never uses the system there will still be backups of data. It would cheap to run, you'd only need one/two low end servers, for mirroring.
I think that could work well, due to the nature of different forums, some are extremely active and admins want constant backups, others are inactive and don't have any valuable data. This would work even better with the forum export system, you could implement and a "Download database dump!" which gave the user the option of paying the export fee, and then it automatically sends them via email, or download, a copy of the database.
It would take some work, sure, but if done right it would be a massive improvement over the servers being slowed by the backups, especially if they're affecting the users 'experience'.
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admin (no pm's please)
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Aside from the minor service impact at the moment, I'd say we have an excellent system. All databases saved once a day with no ifs, buts, user intervention etc.
There is an astonishing rate of recovery failure in IT. e.g. where people think they have backups, but when push comes to shove those backups are flawed.
Keeping it simple helps protect against that, keeping the backup server unknown and inaccessible to forum owners is also important as it adds to the security of the system.
There is also something darn right wrong in the suggestion that people should have to pay for backups, e.g. if you have a "free" forum then we don't care about your data. That will never happen.
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query
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| admin (no pm's please) wrote: |
There is also something darn right wrong in the suggestion that people should have to pay for backups, e.g. if you have a "free" forum then we don't care about your data. That will never happen. |
I meant a different level of service. The same way people pay to remove adverts. They get a free 'basic' backup system, but then the people running more critical forums can opt to have them backed up more often.
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Bravo
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I've suggested such systems in the past, but Admin wants to run MFF on an 'ethical' basis which means he likes all to get the same service, and all to get it free. It's just one more reason why MFF is (in my opinion) the best free forum provider in the world.
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Lynne
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| admin (no pm's please) wrote: | | 8.30am does sound like the backup system taking its toll, one of those things worth living with when you consider the benefit. All the same something I hope will be better with the new systems in place. |
absolutely and it has only been down for a few minutes at most so can't complain at all
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admin (no pm's please)
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| Bravo wrote: | | I've suggested such systems in the past, but Admin wants to run MFF on an 'ethical' basis which means he likes all to get the same service, and all to get it free. It's just one more reason why MFF is (in my opinion) the best free forum provider in the world. |
Indeed, whilst clearly we need to make money to exist, I'd much rather this was done simply via advertising, donations and domain name sales. These are things that mean there is a level playing field on the service people get. We are perfectly open to other means of making money because as I say we need the money to run.
But once you get into money making schemes that create a two tier service then you have a situation that I don't want to get into. Once you have a "better" paid service then you have to have a "worse" free service else why would people pay for "better".
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Ask Mr. Religion
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| admin (no pm's please) wrote: |
How grating would it be if when you tried to access your forum it might have 5 minutes when it was displaying a:
"This forum will be available momentarily, please be patient whilst a backup takes place"
message. This would generally be in the early hours of the morning, though of course globally your morning may vary!
How awful would you find it if you didn't even get a message, the service was simply dead for a few minutes? |
Having a message stating the issue is of course better than no message at all. If implementing this message is an issue, I could forewarn forum members of potential glitches if I knew the actual backup hour scheduled. I could make this a part of the forum's FAQs.
AMR
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admin (no pm's please)
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With some backup systems offline means OFFLINE no way no how can you get told what is going on Obviously whilst such a method needs to be considered if it has technical advantages, the disadvantages are clearly major.
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P Shivers
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Sorry I have missed this great discussion. I have been moving and not connected.
It seems that the general consensus is 3 days max and 1 day optimal with some sort of admin control. Would there be a way to have a switch in the control panel with a default of 3 days, but optional 2 and 1? That way admins don't have access to the servers, but do have access to how frequently the backups are done. With the default of 3, only those who wish to have a more frequent backup done would change it and that may cut down on the numbers.
My 2 cents.
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admin (no pm's please)
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To be honest I think the general consensus is for 24 hours, and options are an unwanted complication.
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Myles
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Ditto.
There was no general consensus on paying £120 per year (£10 per month) for more than one backup per day, besides there wouldn't be enough forum owners willing to pay that to justify it's existence.
A backup per day that is done automatically was more of the consensus i would think.
If the forums have to go offline for 5 minutes while the backup is being carried out then i personally have no problem with that. I prefer the deplay message rather than having no message.
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Myles
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| admin (no pm's please) wrote: | | 8.30am does sound like the backup system taking its toll, one of those things worth living with when you consider the benefit. All the same something I hope will be better with the new systems in place. |
Is this the time that the backup takes place for myfastforum as well, or are fast, fun, fine, free and fab backed up at different times?
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admin (no pm's please)
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All domains are treated the same. They are only different names.
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Myles
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| admin (no pm's please) wrote: | | All domains are treated the same. They are only different names. |
Thanks.
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admin (no pm's please)
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I have done some database cleaning work today, but it is still the case that backup pressure continues to mount.
It will be a mountain of work, but I am actually looking forward to new server day as it will be a chance to start afresh.
At the moment the backups are essentially server backups, geared to the fact that there are a few non forum domains run on the servers and they also need a backup regime. That makes things complex, having two backup systems on one server that just backup the relevant bits is doable, but as I say complex and complex and backups don't mix well in my experience.
I think the new system will as has been suggested create individual forum backups and only do so for active forums. The backups much like an export will just package up a forums database, avatars, web pages, templates as well as profiles and portals. The actual myff forums system is identical on each server so as long as there is one master copy somewhere, it really does not need endless duplication in the backup system.
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Roy
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3 day's sounds good but how much does it cost to back each and every forum up per day, is running the backup every 3 day's going to be the kind of cut backs you wanted, i personally wouldn't be too annoyed if it was more like a week as long as MYFF didn't go under due to running costs.
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query
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Just a note about your current export/backup system: When running an export and sending out the email, the webpages backup doesn't exist. Didn't see any reason to mention before as I didn't need webpages, but just realised it could be important if you're using same regime for backups.
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admin (no pm's please)
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The export system is totally different to the backup system. I was being sketchy with the detail for the sake of brevity.
Even doing the backup every X days whilst more economical does not deal with the load pressure that hit forum speed every X days. We need the new server system to deal with both cost and speed.
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thehrforum2
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IMHO (in my humble opinion) if you had the forum default to a particular time where it timed out to backup every day, I wouldn't see any issue with that. Nor with a statement saying that the forum was unavailable at that particular time. The key point is that things are backed up so that should something occur not everything is lost. That speaks volumes to me and I know to the members of my forum.
A forum I belonged to previously, would be unavailable every morning between 4-4:30 a.m. It wasn't a big issue and half the members didn't even notice!
As long as the system was able to do what needed to be done- you have my green light.
Thanks for a wonderful place to host a forum- I couldn't be happier nor could my members...well there is this one, but no one can make them happy
thehrforum2.myfreeforum.org
M
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admin (no pm's please)
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There is something to be said for clean backup messages on a forum by forum basis, rather than a general system overload, hopefully we can avoid either happening.
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