Seeing OBG's farewell message again gave me some comfort knowing that his knowledge and kind, helpful contributions will continue to live on here on this forum (hopefully forever). However, being a member over on candlepowerforums and watching the disappointment and concern as the owners of that site apparently attempt to reconstruct it from Google caches after a catastrophic failure of some undisclosed type makes me hope that some type of regular backup protocol and disaster plan is in place for The Survival Forum. The information here is truly invaluable and could save many lives in the event of a major disaster. Many people would be devastated if it was lost. Thanks to Doug and the moderators for making the place that it is.

Well said.

Thanks to Doug and all the cast of characters for their efforts.

Wow, the CPF meltdown is a scare. The wealth of hands-on knowledge that hangs in the balance ... it boggles the mind, and tightens the gut. Such is our brave new digital world.

On one hand I fully believe that ETS is worthy of regular backup and protection from the failures and ephemeral nature of the web medium and server malfunction.

On the other hand I think the main productive output of ETS is not the web site, lots of good information, some of the best overviews and analysis of survival equipment out there, or the forum, as good as it is. Rather the big payoff is in the ideas, concepts and principles impressed upon peoples minds, a way of thinking that transcends equipment and the specifics of any survival situation.

Agreed Well Said.
Thanks tons to all who make this site one to go to.

Lee

I agree that the Candlepower Forums situation is scary.

We do back up the site on a pretty regular basis, including the forums and blog. I'd like to do a daily b/up of the forum and blog, but for a variety of frustrating reasons that seems to be damn near impossible to get done. I thought we found an affordable solution, but it didn't work off the bat and then it got shoved to the back burner to figure out why it didn't work and fix it. Given that the site is hosted for free, what can I say? I keep asking and it keeps getting put off.

All anything takes is money, which we don't have nearly enough of. As such, all I can do is beg, so to speak.

Thanks for the interest and support.

I download useful info from the Internet and don't rely on others to back up the info I need. That includes info on Youtube, forum sites, emails, pdf files, etc. I have so much info stored locally that I have not had a chance to study all of it.



I understand your concern, but I don't necessarily agree. A major disaster is game time. Once the game starts, there's no time to learn how to throw a football for the first time, if you know what I mean. Whoever needs to log on to this site during a major disaster, to learn how to start a fire or whatever, has completely missed the boat on the usefulness of this site.

I would be glad to help in any way I can for web related tasks. We are a web development company and utilize our own servers, and bandwidth. We'd be glad to work with you on a free backup solution for the forum or a combined solution for the entire site. I would also like to offer a free(valid) license of vbulletin4.0 to upgrade/migrate the forum too.

-Todd

... but has anyone tried to actually do a restore? I would suspect with the lack of additional hardware, and being hosted for free, that probably wouldn't happen.

Do you have any idea how much this site would cost to host?

There's an organization, the Internet Archive , that crawls the web to build up an historical snapshot of the Internet.

http://waybackmachine.org

This works even if the site is gone. so the CPF folks might want to visit this site. They can rebuild their lost bages by opening the page a viewing the source code. Then paste and edit the code in a web authoring tool.

I noticed that the Equipped To Survive site has been crawled since 1998 but has not been actively crawled since April 2009. Here's a link to their FAQ about crawling.

http://faq.waybackmachine.org/my-sites-not-archived-how-can-i-add-it/

I wonder if the sites robots.txt file has rules that prohit it.

I'll be in touch next week, heading out to LAS to give some seminars. THANKS!

Oh, we have had to restore the forum a few times over the years...

How big is the back end db?

You know, if the backend DB is less than 2 GB you could put this on a dropbox folder (dropbox.com) and have a "backup" in the cloud free and with dropbox you have the option of having the client installed on other workstations in your office and have it replicate the DB dump on your LAN for you. That way you have both an on-site and off-site copy of the DB... or I think mozy.com still gives the first 2 GB free of backups free.

In either case you would just have a cron job dump the DB to a mozy backed-up folder or a drop box folder and you wouldn't have to do anything else... other than periodic test restores to make sure what you are backing up is good.

I don't work for either company but am a happy customer of both.

-H

Todd - You're the man!