haha

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How dose that work... ? u have to be awake to be tired or if your not awake than your sleeping...

Just picking on ya ahain

BTW i have done all of what u have said.... geeze show u how long it takes me to learn

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Notice what I said..."When I am tired, you are typically not awake"

You referring to Larry

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Luckily the backup issue hasn't come up yet but now I'm getting a bit paranoid and I think I'll be testing my backups this weekend. In what way do you guys test your backups? Do you have the forum installed in a different directory/domain and then try to restore the backup there? That's what I've been planning on doing.

As for any mistake I've made, it would be similar to what Ryan mentioned. It's late, I'm tired and I just overwrote a file that wasn't saved anywhere else. Thankfully it doesn't happen often and the files that I lose are easily recoverable - so far!

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Mark Blair
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If you have a good, proven method of backing up, you don't really need to "test" your backups often. It would be a good idea to test a backup at least once to be sure it is being taken properly, because we did have a problem like that at AF. We found that the backups we were making could not be restored because of one of the tables in the database. To put it simply, one of the mods we installed was hard for the database to import to the point where it gave up, so we had to tweak the script a little bit....and I guess it wouldnt hurt to test your backups periodically, but I dont really think that is required.

If you want to know how we handle backups here at AF, refer to this thread

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I think mine was agreeing to help ryan with post fusion

But on a serious note, it was probably the same, backups. I now have a nice routine, with a 400Gb mirrored server sat under my desk, it backs up and verifies everything every night.

i use NaviCat for my Mysql backups now, and it takes a backup of the most active tables i have every 30 minuites, the most active databases every 3 hours, and then everyat about 2 in the morning.

Then at about 5, all my servers start connecting to it via ftp and backing them selfs up onto that server.

Its normally all done for about 10am. Then on a sunday morning, the first thing i do is backup the latest copy only 6 DVDs (yes, thats 28GB of space they take up) and then the previous weeks backup gets taken to a bank.

For those who dont know, the company i work for has nearly 15 servers at the moment, plus some personal ones of my own, so backups have become very important.

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Wow, awibble, that's some serious backup routine. It sounds great though and it seems a heck of a lot better than what I've seen at many other places.

As for the vB backup I create, it's setup via a cron job and runs at 5:00am every morning. I then just download the .gz files from the site and store them locally. Those are then saved on a second machine running a RAID 1 setup with two 120GB drives. The only thing I have yet to do is restore the backup to make sure it works. That is something I'll be doing this weekend though after reading through some of these posts.

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Mark Blair
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The Raid 1 computer that you are downloading the backup onto... is this running linux?

If it is, what you can do is automate the download (if you ahevtn already) by using wget and cron. Once you have it downloaded, you can setup a shell script to automatically extract the backup, and load it into a database. I found this very useful, as you can then instantly look at a second forum installation and see if the backup has bene sucessful.

Another option is to use mysql hot copy, which you could actually setup to copy the database to a second database more oftern, and thus have a regular hot copy of the database. This should be used in conjunction with another backup solution, but it can oftern help in fast resotores.

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The backup server I have is running a device called reByte. It does have a Linux OS on it but as far as I can tell, it isn't customizable. It's basically the reByte device plugged into the primary IDE connection on the motherboard and then two 120GB identical drives connected to the secondary IDE connection. This is all in it's own machine as well. I login to an interface to setup how I want things backed up and then it does it at the times I specify. The nice thing is I can set this across my little network as each machine can access that server. I may have to ask you how to setup this second install where I can then test the backups regularly when I have more time. It sounds like a great idea and something that is much easier than I thought for testing the backup db.

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Well, for CaMiNation, as of now, I do not have any regrets. But with my old website, I think I regret not taking the time to find a well established staff. I was too busy getting the site up ASAP versus taking a little longer and making it a lot better.

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