Oh, I read that. I don't know about Andy, but most of us little guys who have websites don't actually have physical control of our servers. We use space on a shared server that's part of a server farm. Some may have a virtual private server, but it's still basically a shared server at a server farm. It is possible to set up a private server, but it's quite a bit more work and headache and the internet connection to run a private server is a bit more expensive. Most standard ISPs turn a blind eye to something like a video surveillance server or a file server that's just used for internal personal use and file access, but they will shut you down if you're running an open web server. Its universally in their TOS.
In addition hardly any complex web scripts use an easy to backup flat file structure. Most use a secondary SQL or MySQL server to store databases. You don't have direct access to it like you do with your web server. You have to go through a control panel and use an SQL admin interface. I don't know if you could set up a chron job to do some sort of automatic backup, but it's certainly more involved than just cloning a drive that's physically in your possession. In this case one of the indexes for the database had become corrupted based on the messages that we were able to see. Possibly the database itself had been corrupted. Even if there was a backup it's possible that the backup may have been corrupted.
A clone might not have been very practical.
I've been running web scripts using various databases for about 20 years, and lost all my online data a couple times.
SMF no longer has an easy internal database backup/restore tool. I find that to be highly annoying as it makes the easiest way to change hosting companies unavailable.
I'm not saying that some sort of backup that would have facilitated restoring The forum faster couldn't have been done. I'm just saying it might be a little bit more complex and involved than you think, and we have to note that Andy has been busy and slow sometimes even to send out licenses for new CamBam purchases. The time necessary for the sort of continuous backup and restore capability you talk about may simply not be available to him.
Andy, if you feel like deleting this go ahead but please give Lloyd time to read it first.
