Just a brief thanks to the Manjaro Team for their resilience in working to re-form the forum straight after the earlier difficulties.
I am just wondering if the (virtual) office swear-box is overflowing?
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Hey, welcome back!
From what i can tell, our stance was optimistic all the way, yet the decision was to start from scratch and everyone in the team was happy about it and did our best to get here.
No collection in the swear-jar, but beer would be more welcome anyway! 
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Hey bogdancovaciu
Some of us made it over here, no?? No swears for the jarā¦ but one concern-- From reading what little is here understand whats being said about what happened to the old forum. Not being critical but after a number of years having done mission critical sysadm, it is surprising to see. Leads me to my next question which is what assurances are there that portions of the OS have not been compromised. I run Stable on a couple of production machines and when I see the forum compromised to the point where it has to be burned down and started from scratch, then my primary concern is exactly what happened to the forum and whether the OS infrastructure was affected in any way. I have not seen anyone else mention this type of concern and I may be posting this in the wrong place but the question needs to be asked and answered.
Respect
expat
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Hello and welcome back 
Iām sure that by having the issue with the forum was frustrating and concerning for all of us, but that didnāt affected in any way the OS, packages, updates or the ISO files. I would not worry about that at all.
The exact issue with the āoldā forum is unknown even to bytemark that kindly got us with that server for long time. Nothing conclusive, just that no reliable recovery was possible, and after 3 days trying, we decided to go 100% fresh.
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Hey
Well that sounds almost (but not quite) like āwhat do you mean there is smoke coming under the door to the server roomāā¦
Understand about how things can grow over time to take an unrecognizable form and have to be pulled down and built from new. I do regret the plethora of knowledge that may have been lost particularly to newer usersā¦
Much appreciation for all who have and are working on restoration, many thanks for the effort and hours and knowledge.
However- whats implied in your reply is that the infrastructure for the devs in their work is separate from the forum yes??
Iām sure that by having the issue with the forum was frustrating and concerning for all of us, but that didnāt affected in any way the OS, packages, updates or the ISO files. I would not worry about that at all.
Thanks for the assurances here but with a production system it is concerning for me. That having been said many thanks to you for taking the time and interest for the reply-- also thanks to you and the rest of the devs for their great efforts in an unusually difficult timeā¦
Regards
edit- tried to block quote part of your reply here it didnt work as planned
Thanks for your work! 
But, until yesterday I could log in into the old forum.
My mistake was not to āsaveā the many old bookmarks.
Iām using Manjaro from a little time, so they were very important.
If we could log into the old forum, we could find the old bookmarks.
Is it possible, at least for a few days?
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Not possible to log into the archived.forum unfortunately, and will remain read mode only, and more investigation might be done by our kind admins.
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Hi Gan
First- I hope that it can be where you will be able to retrieve your bookmarks from the forum, I know how frustrating the lack of access to important things can be.
If you have storage space and time, you might consider what I do and have done for many years. Whenever I would look to this forum for answers on things Majaro that I needed to administer my systems, when I found the answer I would copy (from the forum) and paste the relevant threads to a write document that I would save with the appropriate title to a folder on the hard drive called ADMIN. I also would copy this folder across different machines where if one wouldnāt boot I still would have access to the folderās contents from another machine. I also have taken to keeping an updated copy of this on a thumb drive for portability and security. My reasoning for doing this is that you arent dependent on having a functioning internet connection nor a working machine to gain access to your administrative tools (things for example like how to chroot into a non booting system to save it).
Good luck with retrieving what you need.
Regards
expat
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problem was limited to the forum losing image data uploaded by users
I suspect it was a problem with Discourse migration, another Linux distribution reported similar problem with lost images before Manjaro forum migration
attempts to recover data also failed, but that forum had a lot less than 370,000 images
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nikgnomic
Thanks very much for this.
regards
expat
Hi expat,
I used to save interesting page forums with Scrapbook Firefox extension, but unfortunately, it doesnāt work anymore with FF Quantum.
So, too I copied and pasted the interesting threads (even if not with the patience and meticulousness that you have - congratulations!).
But then, a few months ago, I discovered the bookmarks feature, and it seemed to me a great (and convenient) feature.
For the moment, Iām retrieving the threads through the Firefox cache (although, for each entry, I have to postpone āarchived.ā to the address starting with āforum.manjaro.orgā. A method that will certainly take a bit of time. They will be roughly 50 threads - Iāve been using Manjaro profitably for a few months, and the more I use it, the more I find that I need Windows less and less for almost everything.
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Hi Gan
A shame about the FF scrapbook extensionā¦copy/paste is somewhat bothersome I agree. I only recently have started keeping the Admin folder updated on a thumb drive --not so far that bothersome with the normal weekly tasks I do to admin my systemsā¦bookmarking is great I agree and a lot less tedious. One of my problems is remembering how to do everything on a particular distro having distro hopped for a while after finally leaving Ubuntu and landing a couple years ago on Manjaro. That plus all the old Unix commands that rattle around in my head from a long time ago soā¦
I hope it works out that you can retrieve the threads you want to archiveā¦and moreover hopefully where the admins can maybe roll the old threads back into some sort of accessible form for those of us that are regular forum usersā¦
I like you use Windows less and less to the point where it doesnt get booted for months at a time. Good luck with the transition and your data recovery
Regards
So basically it sounds like either
- The backups of the forums were not being tested on a regular basis and where not backing up the forums correctly.
or - Backups where not being done period.
So moving forward how were the failed backups resolved and are the new backups being actually tested at least once a month? This isnāt something new many organizations of all size from small startups to some of the largest organizations in the world have at one time or another got caught āwith their proverbial pants downā and lost data. The important thing is that something was LEARNED from the process and changes where made to prevent it from happening again in the future.
So what has changed regarding the forum backup policy and is it currently being backed up now and restores being tested on a regular basis? @bogdancovaciu (I tagged you in this message since you seem to be knowledgeable about the issues that occurred and what was done to in the attempt to recover the old forums).