Are further protection steps for the forum in place now?

[BlueWizard]

Hi forum maintainers,

mine is just a feedback/remind question as a Manjaro user, contributor and supporter that wants his beloved OS ecosystem to be healthy on the long run… and a personal curiosity, don’t blame me for that:

Have you taken further steps to avoid to loose forum users accounts and contents in case this form of accident will happen again?

e.g. some sort of forum backup/snapshot.

Thanks in advance for your attention.

[Aragorn]

@BlueWizard

Have you taken further steps to avoid to loose forum users accounts and contents in case this form of accident will happen again?

e.g. some sort of forum backup/snapshot.

The forum is being backed up on a regular basis, but that was also already the case on the old forum. The problem was a corruption of the database, which extended into the backups. That’s why we couldn’t restore it.

[Hitman_47]

This might help, there are lots of older more popular posts still archived on Archive.org. Is it possible to scrape Archive.org to recover some of them?

[BlueWizard]

Knowing the cause was a database corruption, is it possible to separately backup the database too? In such way, in case of same accident you can restore the database and the forum, right?

Can’t you do that?

[BlueWizard]

The strange thing is that you didn’t think about it for the old forum… it’s a pity we lost all that precious information and useful discussions

Come on guys, here there are a lot of devops and IT specialists that can help to avoid these kind of accidents, you have only to ask to the community for a hand.

[cfinnberg]

Well, it’s not so easily accessible, but it’s still there: https://archived.forum.manjaro.org

[gan]

@BlueWizard, for the moment, you can create a bookmarklet. When you reach the old forum’s page with Google, you can convert the broken link with easy.

Please read this thread, it could do the trick:

[HowTo ] Add a bookmarklet to change URL of Archived forum links

Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆ Clicking on this bookmark will change the URL from https://forum.manjaro.org to https://archived.forum.manjaro.org/ This is a simple temporary workaround for people having trouble with looking up old forum posts and getting Page doesn’t exist error (mainly using search engines). Open your web browser and create a new bookmark. Right-click on the bookmark and Edit the URL/ Location with the following line. (Optional: Change Title / Name) javascript:(function(){window…

[Aragorn]

@BlueWizard

Knowing the cause was a database corruption, is it possible to separately backup the database too? In such way, in case of same accident you can restore the database and the forum, right?

That would be pointless. The forum itself is nothing without its database.

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@BlueWizard

The strange thing is that you didn’t think about it for the old forum…

1. I have no idea what you mean. The old forum was periodically being backed up, just like this one.

2. I was not involved with that. I was a TL3 member on the old forum. I was only appointed as moderator when we were already here on the new forum.

@BlueWizard

it’s a pity we lost all that precious information and useful discussions

Not all of the information is lost ─ as has already been explained. The old forum is still accessible as a read-only archive.

[BlueWizard]

Thanks a lot for the info to recover the old forum contents, I was just a little disappointed for the lost of the old forum. That’s it… the interesting stuff is to be prepared now when these kind of faults happens, learning from what happened.

[gan]

You are welcome!
But it’s all thanks to @ernie, the OP who gave us this indispensable workaround!