WTH HAPPENED TO H-M?

I was a member of a board once that was doing a hardware upgrade and a software upgrade at the same time. They switched the hardware, transferred the files over to the new software and checked things out. When they saw it was working the old hardware was used to take out some frustrations it had been causing and was destroyed. And then they realized what they thought was evidence of a working website on the new software was cached copies of pages. What was supposed to be an overnight shutdown for improvement turned into the loss of years of work of the other members.

It gutted the membership with some going off on their own trying to do their own thing and others just giving up on it altogether. It was quite a bit worse than this, I mean I was just starting to get the eye twitch of withdrawals and repeated episodes of Mr Pete and Abom.
 
Glad to hear you guys are getting things back up and running. These things happen with every site. The important thing is to learn from it and make sure that the backups are 100% for next time. Thanks for all the hard work getting things fixed up!
 
While we grow of course we have growing issues . This site is growing at an an alarming rate for good reason . We're the friendly site ! :)
 
vtcnc said:
The internal_data directory in the backup is setup as a linked directory which is a little weird. But I can open it using my SFTP program."
Click to expand...

If I had a dollar for every time a poorly-written backup program ignored a symlink, I'd have ... well, at least five bucks.

Even Dropbox only just now figured out how to do symlinks, after a decade or so. It ain't a mystery, and it ain't hard, but for some reason the problem persists.
 
ThinWoodsman said:
If I had a dollar for every time a poorly-written backup program ignored a symlink, I'd have ... well, at least five bucks.

Even Dropbox only just now figured out how to do symlinks, after a decade or so. It ain't a mystery, and it ain't hard, but for some reason the problem persists.
Click to expand...
This is something that was new to us. Every other time we utilized a backup, NO problem. This time though, the symlink stopped the show. I have to research this more and learn how it works. With that said, we have been reassured that the issue will not happen again. I'll be working with the host this week to test this assertion and make sure they know what they are talking about.
 
vtcnc said:
This is something that was new to us. Every other time we utilized a backup, NO problem. This time though, the symlink stopped the show. I have to research this more and learn how it works. With that said, we have been reassured that the issue will not happen again. I'll be working with the host this week to test this assertion and make sure they know what they are talking about.
Click to expand...
I'm not an expert but I believe the issue is generally that symlinks can easily create an 'infinite loop'. Say, directory 'A' contains a symlink to directory 'B'. If 'B', or any of it's child directories, contains a symlink to back to 'A', the backup software may get stuck traversing around and around a loop. I believe some backup solutions avoid this potential problem by not following symlinks. Obviously, more sophisticated solutions are available that can avoid such looping issues.

Craig
 
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