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The forum went down yesterday... they probably got erased, either permanently or until one of the admins restores a backup (if there was one). You will probably see a note from an admin whenever they get around to it, detailing what happened and what the status is.

The only time I posted some good posts and the forum went down . It seems to be like everything else, when you don't need it, it's always there, the only time you need it, it's gone and unavailable. Why can't life be more simplier?

Really no answer from the admins? Is this the way how people work or handle things here ? I understand this is a volunteer job, but that does not mean that the royal forum members who care should be left out with puzzling.

Are the admins too busy, too shy, or just too cool to ignor things? But you are the admins, forum members have rights to know what is going on. I don't think it'll take too much time just to inform people that the forum was down and some data got lost, this sounds more responsible and make people trust the forum.

I'm sorry if this is a little too aggrassive, I sometimes just wondering and puzzling the different ways people handle things.

And please don't get my wonderful post "Niagara Fall is beautiful" lost again this time!!

Hey Irene. I understand your concern and I will try to explain why we could not recover from our latest down-time and data loss.

Presently, our server is hosted on a virtual shared server. In real terms, what this means is that somewhere in a remote datacenter, there is a physical 1U rack mounted computer that is running linux. In that Linux Operating System, there is a software virtualization layer (virtual disk manager). This allows the server to create and run multiple virtual server environments. I will not go into detail on this but an example of this type of virtualization software is VMware:

http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html

In any case, LAVA has subscribed to one of these virtual dedicated servers on that physical server. This is an improvement from last year where LAVA was on a shared hosting plan. The shared hosting does not give you any control of the server environment. The virtual dedicated server however acts and "feels" like a real stand-alone physical dedicated server. We have shell access, we can install our own applications and we can even reboot the server if necessary. Another benefit is higher bandwidth and larger disk space, which I hope people notice by how fast the site responds.

BTW, In addition to the LAVA site, there are many other shared servers that reside within this paid-for virtual environment. All of these other servers are personal website domains that I manage.

This configuration has several layers of administration. The backup system is 2-fold. There is one backup process within the virtual environment that allows us to perform daily, weekly and monthly backups. This system was in-place and working. This is what we implemented and we knew it was working. We have control over this backup process. There is another backup system that takes care of the entire virtual environment. This backup happens on the entire virtual disk regardless of what it contains. The problem with this is that you have no control over the backup frequency since it is controlled by the company responsible for the physical server. This is only performed bi-weekly.

So, if there was a corruption of data within the virtual environment (files, databases etc.) then we could easily restore from one of the daily backups and we would only loose a days worth of effort. However if the entire virtual disk crashed then our only recourse is to recover from this bi-weekly backup. This is what happened in the last crash, the entire virtual disk went down. Blame it on the provider? Perhaps, but what can I do about that? To move all my servers and the entire LAVA site to another provider is at least a week worth of my time which I don't have.

So, to close this long-winded answer. The lesson learned here is that we need to backup the LAVA database offsite onto a different server. This can be done quite nicely since all the data is stored in MYSQL. The database can be compressed and fired-off to another server.

As far as responding, I apologize for not doing it sooner. I have, however responded to personal emails asking details about where posts went. On another note, this past month I have had some personal issues that needed taking care of. Even though I love taking care of the LAVA site, it had to be placed lower on my priority list.