[DiMarie]

I am sorry if I missed this topic; is there a way to keep this forum up if the server crashes. Do we need a back up to the back up? I guess it ws techno discussed how this server differs and that would not happen, but I don't recall and would hate to lose this site.

So we don't have so many down times as OBT or what really concerns me is so much valuable irreplacable information that OBT had lost.

So many tried and true meds, treatments, surgerical experiance, even hand holding, and lost members.
I feel that loss.
Dianne

[Rocking4Epilepsy]

I hope the below will ensure you that Doc is ready for anything we may encounter and will keep BT2 up and running..

Hugs

Originally Posted by DocJohn

There's been some speculation that we will become a paid-membership only community. There is no truth to this speculation -- what you see here today will always be free. We have no current plans to run ads on the site, either, because it doesn't really cost us anything to keep these forums running.

Others have wondered why OBT has so many problems running forum software while we don't... I honestly don't know. We did make him the offer to run/host OBT when it went down and I heard nothing back from him. (Getting vBulletin up and running literally takes about 15 minutes if you're not doing an import -- which he didn't do.)

I think the problem comes in that OBT decided to purchase their own server and so you have to work with the hardware you have, even if it breaks. In the hosting world, all hardware is commodity and virtually the same, so if one of our servers goes down, we just swap out hard drives into a working server and we can be back online in a few hours. This is why I lease all of our servers, so if one goes bad, I get a new one in a few hours.

Once running, software like this requires very little maintenance. We run a script once a week to clean up the database and we monitor stuff, but it really pretty much takes care of itself. However, as a community gets large (greater than 20,000 members, I'd say), some little issues can turn into bigger issues, since it all runs on a database. The key is to keep active tabs on things and put monitors in place to let you know things are going wrong *before* things become catastrophic.

In 11 years, I've never had a community be down for more than a day (including running the world's largest online mental health community for 4 years) and I've never charged for any community.

John

[DiMarie]

I think what I am really concerned with and wonder, is tehre a drive that is a sister twin with all the information stored to retrive it?

Does someone have a back up somewhere, aside from getting a system back online. In police work at night and weekly we did back ups on an external drive. I also had protability in case of fire to install in a new system.

Granted OBT had years and too many post to count to store, but can it be done.
I am sick over the information it seems we lost at OBT. I was even concerned and upset when the new system went online, we were no longer able to link back to the old forum anymore for some reason, none of them.

There were some back ways in for some information, such as the way back etc. But nothing like a click and link.
Di