Ways to show your support of our forum

[Fraser]

It's just overall forum usage. It's a massive database containing a decade's worth of posts and member history. At any time, there are a large number of people browsing the forum and posting. There are search engines crawling through the posts. It just takes a lot of resources.

[Jeff Root]

Do you have backups from years past?

I tried to make copies of all the posts on the FidoNet
Space and Astronomy echoes and on a couple of the
GEnie SpacePort categories, but I still haven't moved
them from floppy disk to current media. It is possible
that my copies are the only existing record of all those
thousands of posts.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[Fraser]

When I was maintaining the forum, I was taking snapshots of the server about 4 times a day and storing them on Amazon S3. But it was an incremental system, so I didn't maintain a full backup beyond a few weeks - otherwise it just got too expensive to drag this data along. So, it allowed me to recover from catastrophic failures of Amazon EC2 (which happened a couple of times).

Once the forum gets to a certain point, it's really like wrestling with an elephant any time you want to do anything with the entire database.