We're back... AGAIN!

[Justin Derrick]

Hey everyone...

While trying to move the Forums to a new cloud provider over the holidays (with a better reputation for mail delivery) and doing some upgrades at the same time, I made a tremendous mistake, and deleted the *real* ODUG Forums, instead of the test machine I *thought* I was working on.  The real catastrophe came when I realized that the backups I was using to do the migration only existed on the real server, and the only offsite copies were several months old.

Unfortunately, we've lost about 5 months of data from the Forums, including posts, replies, and new user memberships...  but also small fixes and improvements I'd made to the server -- tightening firewall rules, database performance tweaks, among others.

To ensure this never happens again, I took a few parts from my old office, and built a 30TB backup server with 3x redundant storage -- 5 disks of ZFS RAIDz3.  Local database backups happen nightly.  Whole-server file-level backups are initiated from the new backup server, which is currently living on my desk.  Offsite copies to a 'tough' USB stick will be rotated out at least monthly.

I've always taken the reliability of ODUG very seriously, and I'm sorry for this lapse that's resulted in data loss.

Having said all that...  ODUG has been extraordinarily quiet lately, and the actual volume of new users / posts / replies has been very low.  That's something I've been meaning to work on as well.  I'll start another thread about that shortly.  :)

-JD.

 

[JeanineJ]

I thought I was losing my mind last week when I went to reference odug for something CMOD and couldn't get it.  I'm glad you're back.

[Justin Derrick]

I did get a few "Hey, I can't reach ODUG" eMails and texts over the past two weeks...  :D

-JD.