AK has been restored from a backup

Hiya,

And what I perceive as a bonus. The site appears to be much more responsive and I am guessing that if its running Mysql in the back end the restore likely "Defragmented" the tables.

Frannie
 
Wonder how many of US could restore from backup if it all went horribly wrong?

(nudge nudge)
 
Had me worried- I thought I said something that caused an entire thread to be nuked! Or maybe I did and we'll never know.
 
Wonder how many of US could restore from backup if it all went horribly wrong?

(nudge nudge)

I can and its not as easy as you think.

The database in most cases needs to be off line during the restore. (Why the site was off line for a while)

You really can not merge back the changes from the backup "Delta" without a massive amount of effort. (Why its almost impossible to get back the posts that were since the backup "Delta")

Considering that things were screwed up (Corrupted) somewhere since that "Delta" who knows when ??

What was done here as a "Herculean" task pulled off by Zeus himself to have it back at all.

Frannie
 
Last edited:
Lesson to all of you folks who don't do a personal backup on a regular basis. You never know when it's going to happen, but it is going to happen someday. You'll see how difficult that simple restore will be.

What WW and all the others here have done - in just a short period of time - makes my head hurt thinking about what's involved. Thanks again guys!
 
Well done, AK administrators! I lost a handful of posts, and more than 30 likes, but the site is working again, and that's what really matters. If I want more likes, I can simply post more pictures. :)
 
I don't know how these things work, but wonder if the need for the restore was somehow connected to the removal of the Marketplace forums recently.
 
Hiya,

I don't know how these things work, but wonder if the need for the restore was somehow connected to the removal of the Marketplace forums recently.

Well as far as I am concerned unless we are trying to assign blame to something/someone (That should not be) it does not matter.

Most every person posting here has no real right to that insight also as far as I am concerned.

Unless you are someones mom , boss or wife/husband of course.

The "Stuff Happens" rule applies here along with "He Who Cast The First Stone" (Yah I know its worded differently in the Bible)

Frannie
 
Wonder how many of US could restore from backup if it all went horribly wrong?

(nudge nudge)

Actually, it's kind of like rolling your computer back to the last known time it worked correctly. I had to do a rollback on my guitar player board. Lost a bunch of posts but it beats a crippled board
 
And what I perceive as a bonus. The site appears to be much more responsive and I am guessing that if its running Mysql in the back end the restore likely "Defragmented" the tables.
An extra hamster was added to the treadmill. :D
 
Actually, it's kind of like rolling your computer back to the last known time it worked correctly. I had to do a rollback on my guitar player board. Lost a bunch of posts but it beats a crippled board

I was talking more about our own personal systems. One of my favorite gripes about the newer WindOHs! builds ... you can no longer "save" a System Restore, and the ones you get are automatically deleted. That used to be the way to go, allowing you to reset to a time when you KNEW everything was working the way you wanted it to, and not when Windows THOUGHT is was working right.

As far as AK goes, I'm surprised XenForo doesn't have more robust restoration tools available. Seems to me the background databasing software could be set to much shorter intervals for incremental backup ...Then again, we're talking a HUGE database here, and there's always a trade off between speed and reliability.
 
For registry backups I have never used System Restore. ERUNT is what I've used for years. Still works on recent versions (as long as you give it elevated privileges).

But for database backups, it is not so simple. MySQL (or MariaDB which I prefer, but is functionally a drop-in replacement), you cannot simply copy the database files to another drive for a backup, due to the way InnoDB tables are used. A proper backup uses mysqldump, and unfortunately it puts such a load on a server that it is almost crippling to run it. (One of the boards I manage had over 13 million posts, so it's not a simple three-minute operation.) The only efficient way I've found is to have a completely separate server for backups, where the process can run and remotely make the queries using the internal network. Even there, it can saturate the NICs and in that case, it would help to have a second NIC in the main database server simply to use for backups, so normal traffic is not affected as much.

It's easy to say "back up the data" but a lot harder to do in practice...
 
Hiya,

We are also assuming that the 4:00am backup was the last backup.

It could be there are later backups but whatever corruption occurred during those periods of time and the latest "Good" backup was the older backup.

First question I ask clients who request a restore is when. Most of them don't go with the latest backup actually but some backup earlier that was before they jumped down the rabbit hole and screwed up their site.

So speculation about more frequent backups could be way way off the mark. They may have more frequent backups but not good for getting the site back in the most efficient state.

Frannie
 
Back
Top Bottom