Have you ever had to restart a forum?

Like anything else in life, if you want someone else to do the work, it costs.
For sure. Human time costs so much more than storage.
When you said "expensive" perhaps you meant some kind of service provision, rather than just the storage?
Would you be comfortable with, or have the time to back up a large site on a daily basis and check which backups you should keep and for how long - especially if the backup was many 100's GB in size?
I wouldn't regard any backup approach as fit for purpose if it depended on manual intervention, unless that intervention was from a permanent team of IT professionals (and even then I'd be sceptical).
Instead, you develop and test a system (including recovery, of course), and then ensure that it runs automatically, N times per day/week, as required. (This can be really simple though, see below.) Periodic testing of backup integrity and recovery testing is... prudent.
Once the automatic system is in place, the ongoing effort to check up on it now and then is minimal.
Buying storage can be cheap, buying a service not so cheap. If you can get it done cheaply, then don't just go for it, share it so we can all benefit.
If someone isn't personally proficient in the required areas, they can opt for a service where things are done for them by some provider (I guess XenForo Cloud falls into this category - min price for it appears to be $60/month).

If they are capable of doing it themselves, things can be much cheaper. Depending on your server setup, it may be possible to set up a regular backup - e.g. using rsync & mysqldump, which on Linux you can automate with a cron job. (This is what our site uses, though I didn't personally create the backup scripts. Our backups run to multiple TB.)

On any server/hosting setup on which you can't easily run your own backups, I'd very much hope that a backup option exists for a reasonable cost, or better still is included in the hosting costs. However I've never looked at any XF hosting offerings out there, other than XF's own Cloud system.

I have no idea which options you've considered, nor what kind of server you have - hence my question about which services you've considered.
 
Sorry to be harsh - but I am always astounded by people complaining that something broke their forum (eg upgrading to XF 2.3 before they've tested that all addons work correctly!!) and that they don't have a backup to revert back to, despite the instructions always saying "make sure you take a backup first".
I want to take a moment to point out there are various levels of commitment between clients, and I think this is a great example of a fundamental difference between "casual" hobbyists and "serious" website owners. This is harsh advice when its directed to hobbyists; they want to install pretty themes and the latest blog add-on and to design fun badges, not worry about backups. It's their website and content that they leave at risk; if they choose to not take backups, that's their decision.

The more that I think about forum building in 2024, the less appropriate I think it is for people who want to do it for fun.
 
This is harsh advice when its directed to hobbyists; they want to install pretty themes and the latest blog add-on and to design fun badges, not worry about backups. It's their website and content that they leave at risk; if they choose to not take backups, that's their decision.

You are completely correct - it is entirely their decision.

But those same people then complain on the forums when things get broken because they upgraded their production site to the latest beta release before checking that everything would work. They complain to addon developers that their free addons don't work on the new version of the forum software and has broken their site.

These are things that have actually happened here on XenForo.com in recent months :rolleyes:

Whenever a user posts on here asking for help with their broken site after performing some task, the first step is always to recover from backup. That's what backups are for. Don't expect anyone to spend any time trying to fix your mistake when the fix is to recover from the backup you didn't take.
 
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We're going to have a good laugh with XF3!

Ironically, I don't think it will be quite as bad with XF3 - because that is always going to be a major upgrade and there should be less of an assumption that the upgrade will just work.

I'm rather unimpressed with the breaking changes that were released as 2.3 and the amount of work I've had to do as an addon developer for a point release. These changes should have been released as 3.0 and then subsequent major UI changes released as 4.0

I'm currently presented with this option every time I log into four of my forums:

1724892468929.webp

It's so tempting to push that button - because it's just so easy. However, I know that if I do, I will irrevocably break my site requiring me to restore from backup - because there are a bunch of addons that haven't yet been upgraded to work on this major new release due to breaking changes.

I sincerely hope that the XF devs don't make the upgrade to XF 3.0 the same one-button click, because that is going to cause chaos for the unwary and those who click buttons without having backups :rolleyes:
 
Ironically, I don't think it will be quite as bad with XF3 - because that is always going to be a major upgrade and there should be less of an assumption that the upgrade will just work.

I'm rather unimpressed with the breaking changes that were released as 2.3 and the amount of work I've had to do as an addon developer for a point release. These changes should have been released as 3.0 and then subsequent major UI changes released as 4.0

I'm currently presented with this option every time I log into four of my forums:

View attachment 309842

It's so tempting to push that button - because it's just so easy. However, I know that if I do, I will irrevocably break my site requiring me to restore from backup - because there are a bunch of addons that haven't yet been upgraded to work on this major new release due to breaking changes.

I sincerely hope that the XF devs don't make the upgrade to XF 3.0 the same one-button click, because that is going to cause chaos for the unwary and those who click buttons without having backups :rolleyes:
Yeah but mate, if you don't you'll end up getting a heap of security issues.
 
I've never seen a forum come back from the dead when a database has been lost. Whether it's due to insufficient backups or an owner who continually wipes the database, once it's gone it's gone and there's simply no way back.
 
When you said "expensive" perhaps you meant some kind of service provision, rather than just the storage?
Exactly that. I personally don't need such a service for backups, my sites are purely for my own pleasure and for those who also take pleasure from them - members are really sparse, but visitors run into the 1000's so someone is liking them. If either of them fall over, I do have backups, but they are ones I have done manually; for basic preservation, as each is quite easily recreated. However, those backups took some time as they were complete site backups - backing up the database is only one half of the equation; the database is next to useless without the file structure being there. Sites with 1000's of MB/GB of files, if they are not stored off-site, can present a substantial time element in making backups. So, unless you have huge amounts of storage for backups of large sites, an external service would be appropriate, but at a cost. It's always a compromise between expediency and cost.
 
I'm rebuilding a corrupt MySQL database for a forum now. Nothing was able to be done on it for less than I was willing to pay for ~750 posts (with no guarantee that it could even be done).

Fortunately, ChatGPT (4o) is pretty damn smart.

If you find your /var/lib/mysql/*database*/*table*{.ibd} (or your MySQL datadir) and tell it to extract as much human text as possible, it will give you the steps on how to restore it, which didn't work for me. However, you can pressure it with commands like, "give me as much human-readable text" and "Give me all human-readable text, ignoring random binaries, in a JSON format". Both will essentially do the same, as in, make it a lot easier to copy/paste and recreate it on site.

You'll still need to run some copy/paste through ChatGPT with something like "Leave BBCode intact, but remove extra binary characters" to make it plain text or you could still get stuff like " p7T " in your output.

I'm now switching to Managed hosting under @MySiteGuy, as this is the 2nd time Plesk decided to corrupt my database. There's no reason why it should've swapped to MySQL 8, converting it, but failing to convert all the way, making it impossible to read in either MySQL 8 or MariaDB.

I'd say, it's taken me a good 4 hours to get back 60% of the meat and potatoes of the site and about 30 minutes to configure the ACP/permissions/nodes/add ons, etc. as I already had that in a draft on what steps to take, which is far less time than I took trying to restore the database (if I just went the ChatGPT route, I'd be done and moving on with new content).

It is absolutely my fault. I forgot 1) to turn on automatic backups at Vultr on the instance before building it up to where it was, and 2), didn't have automatic backups on in the control panel, and 3) never downloaded any backups (because there were none) as I went. A huge oversight on my part.
 
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Yes, last year. Yes i should have kept a backup but lost 20 years worth of posts due to a hack (common server access account credentials i used to give to some devs to check things. Forgot to disable it when not in use). Front page was defaced, db was deleted and was told to deposit a bit of crypto to an account to get it all back.

Fortunately my users all helped to get going again. Whether it required creating common threads, or doing data entry for custom addons we have, people offered to help even when on long haul flights.

Learnt my lesson and taking backups now and dont leave admin or server accounts open unless they are in use.
 
Yes i should have kept a backup but lost 20 years worth of posts
It shouldn't have been that hard to restore if it was a public forum. I imagine that you'd have a lot of the content archived.

I only had 3000 posts (good quality posts) that I wanted scraped and restored on a new forum (read only) to free up a Xenforo license.

They could've done it with Archive.org for a couple hundred.

I eventually just took it down because it was only making about $40 a month in AdSense, so restoring it/porting it wasn't worth it as it'd break even in months to a year.
 
It shouldn't have been that hard to restore if it was a public forum. I imagine that you'd have a lot of the content archived.

I only had 3000 posts (good quality posts) that I wanted scraped and restored on a new forum (read only) to free up a Xenforo license.

They could've done it with Archive.org for a couple hundred.

I eventually just took it down because it was only making about $40 a month in AdSense, so restoring it/porting it wasn't worth it as it'd break even in months to a year.
Haha in hindsight probably. If you have a contact person let me know to scrape all old. Its still on archive.org. in the end lost over a mill posts.
 
Haha in hindsight probably. If you have a contact person let me know to scrape all old. Its still on archive.org. in the end lost over a mill posts.
I found the service on Fiverr. Add ons put it well above $5. But, they should be able to scrape a thread with user, dates, posts, etc. to a CSV for more manual recovery.
 
Funny! I've only just reset my forum again and i'm back getting told by the same people to get lost (they used some colourful language that i can't repeat on here)
Anyone wish to join my forum?
If so click the link in my sig
 
I've had to restart my forum a couple of times, not recently, but:
  • When I moved from a hosted forum to a self-hosted forum we had to start over because ezBoard wouldn't let you export your data so we manually reposted everything to our new phpBB2
  • In summer 2007 the forum was hacked (someone found a way to trick it into dropping the users table) and the database backup had issues so we started over on a new phpBB3 forum so that people were not stuck waiting for a fix.
Fun fact: Eventually I was able to put the broken backup back together and when I moved to Xenforo, I converted the old phpBB2 to phpBB3 and merged both the first and second phpBB2 forums into the Xenforo so we have almost all of our posts back to 2004 on the current XF2 forum.
 
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