Hi all,

So we had some downtime last night. I hope it means you actually went out and enjoyed your Saturday night  (PS I did, but then I came back and worked on the BTF database for a while lol).

I was running some maintenance scripts yesterday when my browser crashed midway-- it seemed to have corrupted the database... I repaired it but it was still giving me unsettling errors, so I took BTF back to its (nightly) backup, from 5am Saturday....

But I didnt want you guys to miss out on your 100-150 posts from Saturday, so I just manually found and brought back the topics, posts, and PMs that were created today. At least, most of them Hope you find everything that was supposed to be there, please let me know if you come across any issues!  I dont think I got all the posts to successfully mesh back into the DB, so just re-post something if it's missing. I did my best.

PS - For you old timers on BTF, if you remember when a similar incident happened on POL, and suddenly 3 or 4 months' worth of posts disappeared never to be seen again  

PPS - I'm going to set up either 3 or 4 database backups a day so that even if we need to restore to a backup, we dont lose a full day... Cuz I definitely don't want to sort through a massive database text file to pick out the new content again....

PPPS - GOODNIGHT.

? Terabaap, I've set up BTF with automated nightly DB and file backups, and the file backups are sent to Amazon S3 service... (this is what jungledisk.com and dropbox.com both use on the back-end).  The situation here was a corrupted DB structure, not lost files.

So the best course of action was to go to the nightly backup. 

I've now implemented 4-times-daily DB backups, which I think might be overkill but if it prevents me from having to go through this exercise again I'll be happy

Good decision Saleem. The mySQL databases are a crucial part of any large forum; when I helped manage a forum, we did gzip (gnu) compressed backups twice a day.

PPS was a big LOL! I can't believe you went through the database text file to manually pick out new content. How painstakingly brutal!

All the best for BTF,

~ Basim