The Spam Thread!

[Blackberry Bun]

By the way, do we still regularly backup the site? Can't bear it if the incident happens again..

[huckleberrypie]

Not atm, but I'll be doing it as often as possible.

[Evalana]

My parents and younger sister are up for a visit, so I've been spending time with them. Fun, but it can lead to some long days.

[RAMChYLD]

Maybe I should get around doing the backup.

Hmmm...

How small is the backup, usually?

Can we write a bash script that does a SQL dump, tar/XZ it, and throw it into dropbox or something? And then add it as a nightly cronjob?

To do that, we will need a dropbox client on the machine, but then it can be done, dropbox does have a Linux version, although I'm not sure if it's usable without XWindows running...

Tell you what, will try it out in a while. I'll create a virtual machine for testing.

[RAMChYLD]

Setting up a virtual Debian machine on BingoBeaver now. Goal is to try getting a virtual PHPbb forum up, a Dropbox Client up, and then attempting to write a script that will, at Midnight GMT without fail, backup the database, compress it, and drop it into the dropbox folder, where Blake or I can then just go and retrieve it in the morning.

[cpd2009]

If you ever see SHED.MOV on YouTube, and if you love Fluttershy, DON'T see it! Even if you are curious as to what it is, avoid it like the plague!!

Thankfully, I haven't seen it, but reading the comments from other YouTube viewers, it's pretty sick.

What it is it's part of a twisted series of fan animations called the "PONY.MOV" series. It's essentially MLP:FIM if John Kricfalusi developed the show in place of Lauren Faust.

If one is into Ren & Stimpy type humor, you may be fine watching it. For me, it started alright with the first one, but started going downhill with the second one, and finally hit rock bottom in my eye with the latest one.

I will admit though...the animation is very good for such a skewered take at MLP:FIM.

But again...SHED.MOV...AVOID IF YOU LOVE FLUTTERSHY!! LIKE ME!!

[RAMChYLD]

After testing, I think dropbox is, well, not really suitable.

Maybe there's a better way to do it. Maybe we can just stop after the compression part and let the user just log on via ftp and grab the file in the morning.

I did learn how to set up phpBB on Debian tho. Quite an experience too. Also, Debian prefers PostgreSQL (which I also prefer) to MySQL. Good thing phpBB supports PostgreSQL alike.

Ok, going out now. I need a new flourescent lighting tube for my room. And I have a hankering for Carls Jr right now.

[huckleberrypie]

I personally use MySQL for that. And I think the system does generate a weekly backup of things, although you'll need to do it manually instead of letting the server spit up the files at you. I might ask Chris if we can implement weekly backup notifications or something.

[Kiwifruit Jam]

Hey, I'm still doing the daily MySQL dumps I've set up in August!
Then you only need to care about FS backups too, but I think it's enough to do once in a month.

[RAMChYLD]

I didn't think FS backups are that important. The important part is getting a backup of the /var/www/phpBB folder, and even that I think we only need to do that whenever a mod or theme has been installed, tested and verified, or phpBB has been upgraded.

My thoughts on:
/var/www: Only backup if a change was made to phpBB (i.e. upgrade, theme or mod install/uninstall)
Rest of the FS: Not really needed. Reinstalling the LAMP stack only takes two hours max if you know what you're after and pull off the apt-get commands correctly. Plus, reinstalling will always net us the latest packages anyway. If we restore, we would still have wait the same amount of time for the archive to transfer over and and then to do apt-get update to get the latest packages anyway, and to me, that's somewhat moot.
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