Announcement: Site maintenance

[PJ]

Hi All,

 

I am planning site maintenance this evening (December 8, 11 PM EST). Basically, I plan a full backup the entire site. Most of my day has gone toward researching and developing a back-up strategy, whcih is why I have been extremely quiet today. :lol:

 

The backup will involve backing up the discussion forum software as well as exporting and archiving all our posts. It is inconvenient, but in the event that my ISP has any problems/crashes, we would be able to restore the entire discussion forum in matter of minutes.

 

The board will be offline for about 5 minutes. Apologies for any inconveniences this may cause. Eventually I plan to have a weekly backup, which will cause the board to be unavailable for about 5 minutes each week at a designated time. Once I have fine-tuned the backup process, I will post an announcement about when these weekly backups will take place.

 

Thanks,

 

P.J.

[PJ]

Hi everyone,

 

Okay, made a full backup of the entire site and discussion forums. Is everybody still able to access the board okay? Well, I guess that's one of those silly questions like when the teacher asks "who's NOT here today?!"

 

 

Thanks,

 

P.J.

[Mike and Ying]

HEHE

[PJ]

Okay, it appears that Mike is accounted for! Anyone else? Actually, I'd prefer to hear from the people who cannot access the board! Who can't see/post? Please speak up! If you're not here, please raise your hand!!!

 

Seriously, I think the backup seems to have run smoothly and I plan to schedule a 5 minute service interruption once a week for backups. In the long run, I think it will be good, in case of disaster!

 

Besides, I need the 5 minute adrenalin rush of messing with the production tables. It's like the computer nerd version of skydiving.

 

Thanks,

 

P.J.

[LaoMao]

It couldn't. I couldn't access the site during your maintenance.

[rsun]

You should set up some sort of policy and post it on the front page that talks about when you will do these backups? Hate to see people complain that they couldn't get to the site for the first time when it was coincidentally down for backup

[KandY]

hey! where did my 293 posts go?! i'm only a member again!!

[rsun]

Doh, see what happens when you are too active

 

That's an incredible amount of message though, I didn't think anyone posted that much.

[PJ]

Hi All,

 

I will be posting an announcement on the main page describing the site backup policy. It will only end up taking 5 minutes once a week (not too large of an outage), unfortunately I will need to figure out the optimal time (when few people tend to use the board) to make the backup. I noticed that there were around 20 total people between members and guests when I shut down the board to make the backup, but since I had already made the announcement, figured I might as well go ahead and do it.

 

In the future, there will be more advanced notice and information on the main page.

 

Thanks,

 

P.J.