Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

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Frank Sanns
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Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Frank Sanns »

It is good to see the activity on the forum after the couple of weeks of being down. Here is what happened and what is in progress:

1. The PHP version had to be updated. It was not compatible with the version of phpbb that the forum runs on. Everything in the top right of the login/notifications area disappeared. Just about all of the photos disappeared and so did many but not all of the threads.

2. Rolling back the PHP back to its original state restored the look of the site and most of the threads. Gone were the photos and some of the threads.

3. A variety of restoration procedures were undertaken with none being entirely successful. This included partial restores, automatic and manual updates, and a few more things.

4. It was decided to build a new version of the site with the most current PHP version and the most recent version of phpbb. All was good in the world until the database restore failed.

5. This was the awe shit moment for me personally. Been there done that in 2019. It was then that I broke the bad news to Paul and to the forum.

6. I had tried to solicit help from other sources off and on this forum. Many people offered but I heard nothing new that had not already been tried. Finally over on the phpbb forum "thecoalman" Scott, took a personal interest in our dilemma and our mission here.


The biggest thing that we learned was that ftp does not transfer all files in a folder. It has a limit to the total number of files of 9,999. It truncates all folders that are transferred to that number or less. There are no warnings or error messages whatsoever. Nothing! It just cuts them off midstream and says that transfer is complete. Even Scott was astonished to learn this.

The result of the cutoff of the number of files within a folder. It manifests itself in a result that Rex Allers originally figured out. Some user IDs had their photos stripped from the back in 2019 and it happened again now. Back over on Media Temple, they corrupted our website so we set up a new one and had the issue just described.

Fast forward to now and ALL of my backups have been limited by the FTP and cPanel files transfer systems. NO WARNINGS, just truncating when the number 9,999 is hit in a large folder. That folder is the images folder but called FILES in phpbb.

I will let Scott explain this better but for some reason, the photos make the poster rather than the poster makes the photos. So when the folder that contains the photos is truncated, it takes out all of the photos for a person who has a photo ID greater than a particular number. For this reason, Richard Hull has been hit on both of these occasions with loosing his images. The very person that posts the most and has the most value and we try to protect the most, looses all of his photos. Talk about a bad twist to the story. I had a few difficult conversation with Richard as we have gone along and he has been good about it but it is difficult personally for him and for me bearing the bad news.

Still, it was not throw in the towel time as I felt like there were still stones to be turned over including giving Rex Allers a crack at it since he has done so much to analyze the problem and contribute to the ID understanding. But at the moment we have the super coal man at it!

Scott has done file comparisons of our key backups as well as orphaned attachments which I purposefully never deleted since 2013. He also has looked at my backups from 2013 through present; specifically the photos. Indeed, there are thousands of images that he feels he can write a script to put back into the forums. This would restore the photos missing from MT corruption. He is currently working on that amongst other things.

There still are a bunch of photos missing from the backups which we are waiting for Andrew Robinson to contribute his older backup of the site from 2019 to attempt to recover those. He used a SSH to download his backup when Paul, Andrew, and I formed a pact to have three complete backups in our individual hands. Hopefully he will find that in the next day or so and Scott can continue to build back the rest of the photos.

The tragedy again comes from the effort to keep backups every two weeks for a over a decade only to find out that as they grew by 20%-30% in size, they actually contained the same NUMBER of files. My computer cannot see files greater than 9,999 anyway so I assumed since there was no transfer error and that the size of the backups continued to grow, and that I had oodles of backups, that all was good. I even used two different FTP clients. It is astonishing to me how this is not more well known and published and errors come up in these programs when being used.

My statement from all of this is "How do you know what you don't know?". I still feel like much of this software is black magic.

Yes, I should have used file compare and I should have done this and that but the time and effort for a decade and a half has been way more than of my life than I really wanted to dedicate to technology that really should be more reliable even in the face of operator error. Which I guess in this case again is operator (mine) error from not spending even more time and effort to check that a program is doing what I paid it to do. Doing this down to the individual bytes of data. No thanks.


PLEASE DO NOT REPAIR ANY MISSING PHOTOS YET. WE WILL LET YOU KNOW WHEN AND IF YOU NEED TO DO SO.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Rex Allers »

Just adding a correction to what I think is my remembered history of this mess.

It was me who, in 2019, proposed that an incomplete backup of the '/files' directory could explain the missing attachments we were seeing. I also figured out how it would explain the relationship to missing files vs. certain userIDs (many of them). Bob Reit certainly has more direct experience with phpBB, but to my recollection, I'm the only one who looked in detail at the available symptoms and tried to explain what probably happened -- which I posted in several posts about my theories.

I rehashed this info in a recent post after the current repeat disaster:
Re: Report any problems with site.
Post by Rex Allers » Tue Feb 08, 2022 1:49 am
viewtopic.php?p=94176#p94176

Back in 2019, my help was rejected, in that I would need password access to the server to look around. I had planned to make a local PC with a clone of the Fusor forum, rather than touch the existing one without consensus. Oh well.

The really sad part is that we continued to make incomplete backups of the forum after I described and shared what probably happened, though not exactly why. And then (this time) we made a major change to the forum environment without ensuring, in some safe space, that we could restore a full clone of the forum.

I am grateful that theCoalman has volunteered to help us pick up the pieces. He is clearly an expert. But he can only put Humpty Dumpty back together if all the pieces have been gathered.

I really, really, really hope Andrew has a backup that can be merged to get us to version that can replace the missing stuff to at least pre- the move.

Richard had spent so much time redoing and improving the FAQs since 2019, that I shall be really sad if all this is again lost.

Hope we can find a better way forward with some checks of veracity to avoid another repeat.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Andrew Robinson »

I am in the process of compiling everything that I have on my end going back to 2018 I believe. Luckily I usually always tar.gz anything before uploading/downloading out of habit. I had not considered that this was a problem as it usually doesn't cross my desk. Good work all on spotting the issue. Frank, can you please have theCoalman reach out to me at the email address you have on file so I can send him everything I have? Thanks guys!
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Andrew Robinson »

Just from a first quick cursory glance at one of my backups, I see well over 9,999 in files. ;)
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by thecoalman »

Frank Sanns wrote: Sat Feb 12, 2022 6:52 pm I will let Scott explain this better but for some reason, the photos make the poster rather than the poster makes the photos. So when the folder that contains the photos is truncated, it takes out all of the photos for a person who has a photo ID greater than a particular number.
To elaborate phpBB stores files using 1234_randomstring and I covered the various reasons for this here. While the naming mechanism is not the reason for the missing files it's going to dictate which members are affected by this because 1234 is the user ID of who uploaded it.

There is server configuration that will limit the list of files when using FTP, in this case 10K files. Even selecting a folder for transfer results in only 10K files. This was surprise to myself but I have been using SFTP for more than a decade now, it's unaffected by this limit. I know for fact when using FTP years ago this was not an issue so it would be implementation in recent years. The FTP client gets a message the list is truncated, I don't know if it's standard log message but this is really a failure of FTP client to alert the user that the file list is truncated. I don't know what the behavior is for other FTP Clients but for WinSCP and the client Frank is using there is no warning about this.

I want to be perfectly clear and say none of these issues were caused by phpBB software. At some point the files folder on the server was replaced with a files folder that only contained 10K files. The only reason I immediately realized there was issue with missing files when I first got FTP access was the files folder contained no file prefixed with thumb_, when a thumb is created the file is named thumb_1234_randomstring.

The default behavior of the server is to list files based on filename, files prefixed with thumb_ would be last. The last file listed is prefixed with 4025_ thus any users with user ID greater than 4025 will be affected by this, This also affects any member with user ID of 5, 50's and 500's. You can determine your user ID by hovering over your username on any post, in the following example the user ID is 1234.

Code: Select all

https://fusor.net/board/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=1234
From various backups I'm managed to cobble together an additional 1500 phpBB named files and I'm about to dump another 2600 from files that predate your phpBB installation where the original filename and filesize match missing files uploaded here.

A very rough estimate is there is currently about 5K files still missing but I still have a lot of files to work through. I'm expecting the files that are going to be affected the most are going to be the newest ones posted by those members with the higher user ID numbers.

Before I leave here I'm going to leave Frank two custom scripts, one will identify missing files including the ability to narrow it to specific poster ID. The second script will allow him to upload files provided by affected members so they can be restored into the phpBB filesystem.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by thecoalman »

Andrew Robinson wrote: Sat Feb 12, 2022 8:17 pm Just from a first quick cursory glance at one of my backups, I see well over 9,999 in files. ;)
It's not a limit on total files but limit on files per directory. That said if it was done over SSH the file limit is non issue. See your PM.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Frank wrote:
My statement from all of this is "How do you know what you don't know?"
It seems we are the victim of a very "Rumsfeldian" moment.

For those who don't get the oblique reference: during a press conference in February 2002, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offering what would go down in history as one of the more interesting justifications for invading Iraq the following year despite the absence of any evidence of 'weapons of mass destruction:

Quote Rumsfeld:
there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns–the ones we don't know we don't know.
See it for yourself on the YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REWeBzGuzCc

As Frank has inferred, in this case it was what was hidden from us - the 10,000 file limit - that turned into the unknown unknown and, regrettably, a weapon of mass digital destruction.

But, as with any natural or unnatural disaster, the good news is always the way people rally in support of the recovery effort, which is what we're seeing here.

So I remain confident that, with the aid of our Angel of Mercy aka The Coalman, and now that Andrew has found what could well be the last missing pieces, we can get back to where we were a few weeks ago.

And then we will take all necessary measures to assure that the ghost of Donald Rumsfeld cannot haunt us again.

--PS
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Rex Allers »

theCoalman,

Thanks so much for your help in trying to recover what we can.

And thanks for confirming what I suspected happened in 2019. The 'thumb...' files also being missing fits in nicely. Probably happened in 2019 too but I don't remember that.

I do very much appreciate your help in trying to find missing pieces or rebuilding things from other sources. You are very kind to volunteer this level of support. Much appreciated.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Frank Sanns »

I have corrected your name in my original post Rex.

FYI, the problem back in 2019 was not on our end. MT lost the site including the two day grace backup. There was nothing that could have been done different back then. I had the files from our previous host and I made them available to everybody. Nobody merged them back into the database. Nobody.

Since then on, I will take the heat for not knowing that moving a folder does not mean moving a folder. I have spent 15 years of my life doing my best here. Nobody at any time has suggested a better way to back up or update the site.

In the end, it continues to fall on Paul and my shoulders and on the hosting company. Within hours of the problem we were on with Godaddy to restore. Unfortunately, even a host as big as Godaddy could not roll us a few hours back.

This is not my full time job here. I trusted programs that I paid money for to move databases, files, and photos and literally man months of time doing it. All knowing that the host and two other people, Andrew and Paul had redundant backups on top of that.

The final nail in the coffin was the limited amount of free memory on the host. There isn't any. For me to restore, something had to go. Many things are now cleared off but there is only enough room for one backup and one good site. This is going to change. A big fundraiser is imminent so this site can have sufficient room to grow and not be against limits at every corner.

If it sounds like I am a bit cranky, it is because I am. A little appreciation instead of finger pointing might go a long way about now.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Rex Allers »

Frank,

I realize you are trying to do your best to maintain the forum, a task that is not in your normal realm of expertise. We all do appreciate you're trying to do the best, for our collective benefit, to do all you could see necessary to keep it up.

There seems to be some blaming of the old site host, and perhaps they could have provided backups that would have prevented the 2019 issues. I don't know about that one way or the other.

My point of view is that I spent a lot of time (with Andrew's help on provided database search results) to conclude the /files directory was incomplete. I shared that thought. As far as I know, nobody tried to identify how that could have happened.

Without thecoalman's input on newly discovered problems I would not have expected FTP tools to be inadequate. I guess, now, they were the source of our main issues in backup failures.

But. I think if it was my task to keep the forum intact, after the previous problems, I would have tried to ensure the backups were actually functionally better than they were in 2019. (by some not do-or-die-test) Build a clone of the site somewhere else?

So, I'm a bit cranky too, because I tried to warn/help but the same exact failure happened again.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Andrew Robinson »

Rex,

I think the important thing here to remember is Frank has done all of this over the past 15 years without ever asking for anything in return. He has silently kept this site operational with an impressive uptime during this entire time. There were a lot of issues and additional complications (many of which have not been mentioned here for the sake of brevity) that led to the failures. We should all be very thankful to everyone involved that has supported and maintained this site over the years. Lets focus on getting everything back fully operational and look to the future.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by thecoalman »

The "free" backups some hosts offer are usually not up to date and can result in data loss for many days. If you are not paying for this service I would not rely on it. The other problem with this is if you identify an ongoing issue it's a single backup . If you are paying for this service make sure you know exactly what you are paying for. Is it daily? hourly?

If you have someone that can take on the task I would explore the managed VPS option. This can solve a lot of problems like giving each domain it's own Cpanel account. WHM which is the panel above Cpanel can be a bit daunting but for the most part it will handle updates and the other things you may not want to deal with. The biggest benefit of all is root access which allows you to configure, install or do what you want.

As far as backing and restoring a database when using web based GUI's they have limitations whether it's in phpBB's ACP or phpMyadmin. These limitations like max_execution_time are on php scripts, they simply exit after a given time. It's not problem if you have a small forum but as the database grows so does the processing time to create backups or import them through php script. Your import was failing because of this and at some point your backup is going to fail to be complete. Lear nto use SSH which allows you to issue commands directly to MySQL.

Personally for database backups I use a shell script called automysqlbackup which I'm guessing you are not going to be able to run on shared hosting. This has about any option you may want. Some of the more advanced ones include encrypting the backup and transfer to another machine or service. The basic backup service is scheduled with cron task nightly and will backup every database in MysQL if you desire. The default setting will keep a backup for each of the last 6 days, the seventh backup is added to weekly backup which goes back four weeks and there is one for each month that goes back 6 months.

On my local computer I have a script for WinSCP that is executed by Windows task scheduler early in the morning. It SFTP's into the server and will synchronize the backup folders on the sever to local machine, in my case monthly backups are not synced but only downloaded. This script is also used to sync every file on the domain to my local computer. One thing to be wary about sync is if for example the server files go missing you can delete files on local copy if it's set to do that. Critical directories like phpBB's files folder should only be set to download from server.

Last but not least test your backups. Install something like XAMPP on your computer and try to restore your forum from backups.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Rex Allers »

thecoalman,

Yes, your last short paragraph about testing the results of your backup data for creating a separate clone site is part of what I was suggesting.

Of course there is more needed that should add some kind of regression testing onto the restored test site. Our current site appears OK to the casual user but it has many broken links in some messages. Random testing can't be perfect but at least should look for issues in some posts that were seen in the past.

Much of your message seems to relate to issues about the database. Certainly important and maybe that was part of the problem when the whole site was broken for days. I don't know what was going on then.

Coalman, if you covered it in your post, I missed it. Do you have thoughts on best practice for backing up overall forum data?
That is, the directories that make up the site and its data, which include the /files directory that is so crucial to our problem but also php programs and etc. How we could have done a better job of backing up this non-database data structures seems really important for not repeating problems in the future.

i.e., I have used Filezilla a lot for my own webpages but I gather you have learned it has a cutoff on transfer size. Ouch!
Do you have a clear recommendation on how we should backup our large data sections. You mention SFTP but I am not familiar with that. Is there a way to automate the backup of the whole forum data that really works?

Thanks again for your help.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Andrew Robinson »

There is work that is being planned to incorporate automation, especially automation that does not require overly complex GUI based tools, but this should be a focus at a slightly later date once things are fully recovered. There are plans to have an offline all hands discussion about the future of Fusor.net with all admins/mods/etc. in the near future, but for now I suggest lets not mix the effort required to backup with the continued effort to restore operations. You guys are right, this ABSOLUTELY needs to be discussed, but right now lets all stay focused on recovery.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Rex Allers »

If there is an offline discussion group, I wouldn't mind being included.
My profile email contact should work as a initial level contact.

Bob Reit is pretty well informed, too, if he'd be willing to participate.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by thecoalman »

I covered the procedures I use in previous post for backing up. As far as phpBb files there is only really two absolutely critical folders, the files directory containing attachments and the images directory that contains a few directories that may have custom images including a directory that contains uploaded avatars. The rest can be downloaded or created. Having copy of config.php, the ext folder which will hold extensions you installed, the styles folder which holds custom styles that were installed and the store folder which holds database backups made through the ACP and lastly the language folder if you installed other languages
Rex Allers wrote: Sun Feb 13, 2022 1:30 am i.e., I have used Filezilla a lot for my own webpages but I gather you have learned it has a cutoff on transfer size. Ouch!
I have no idea but since Paul mentioned WMD it should be noted Filezilla is the preferred WMD for phpBB file attachments. It defaults to ASCII mode when no extension is present and this will corrupt binary files. People have lost all of their phpBB attachments because of this and there is no way to recover them I'm aware of. It's not a phpBB centric issue, there may be only a handful of application but they are all affected by this.

Binary mode is safe for any file so why they chose and continue to choose to default to this option I do not know. If you have an unknown file type and have a choice between one method that can corrupt certain files and another that is safe for anything it really isn't a difficult choice. There is no other FTP program I'm aware of that does this and if you are using SFTP protocol it's binary only, even with Filezilla. There is an option in Filezilla to change this behavior for FTP transfers.
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Frank Sanns »

This thread was ONLY supposed to be an update on where the forum is at the moment. Instead the 20/20 hindsight has taken over and even some finger pointing by Rex.

I will repeat YET AGAIN, that this site and softwares are unwieldy and are just waiting for a failure. There are too many weak links and you don't know until there is a problem that something is wrong.

Back in the day an entire website was contained in a handful of folders. One of my sites is still that way today. I wrote it in html and with multiple pages and pictures and other items, the size is a whopping 67 MB. The year was 1994. The site is still clean, functional, and sharp even by today's standards and the site loads fine even on a mobile device. There is no database or other necessary structures. Moving to another host is a simple as copy and paste, then edit in the new host URL and you are running.

Contrast that will our existing situation. As stated by thecoalman, there is a database, a structure, and other critical folders. The critical ones are not in one folder. They are scattered around through different directories so you need to know where to look. Updates can even change some of these locations.

Before this latest problem, had you noticed that the favicon no longer appeared on your latest browser update? It worked the previous iOS but not on the current one. It is not working on my desktop browser. This happens periodically and last time Andrew Robinson and I thought we had it set up for a majority of browsers but alas even that has changed through nothing that we have done.

And then there are the required updates of both the PHP and the PHPBB. The success rate for updates are not 100%. The more complicated or customized the site the more chance for a tiny something not going exactly right. You may or may not notice is as it could be as small as something disappearing out of the ACP or something more significant or even catastrophic like timing out before a restore can finish.

And then the transfer program can systematically corrupt your files or truncate them if it pleases. None of which will give you a warning and you may or may not discover this. The site is now 18 GB and contains many tens of thousands of files.

Of course backups are good and more of them are better until you find out that an entire year of backups had an error that you only now just discovered and your older weekly and monthly backups have been purged to make room for the new ones.

You can do file compares after a backups but not all will agree since some are written as you go.

Of course running a separate site on the server to check a backup works. Of course how many threads and other items to you have to parse to say the site is restored? An example was the loss in 2019 when only some people lost some of their pictures. How many topics and posters do you examine to know if you have full integrity of the site backup? What if it were only an infrequent poster? Do you go through 3,000 peoples post to see if a text, format, or picture is gone or changed? A password corruption? A text field gone? It is absurd to think that a running backup has 100% integrity.

We did this back in 2019 when we recovered from the MT situation. We had all of the correct folders, databases and such. The backups worked when the site was rebuilt. The mistake was believing that downloading that working site from the hosting server to our hard drives would work with the programs designed to do so. That was the critical step that has created our current situation. It was the storing locally of the backups that was the broken link that created this outage.

This is a minefield created by sloppy software technology and it can only be solved by technology up to a point. In the end, a human has to monitor it all and that takes time, expertise, and effort.

I have no confidence that using all of the steps laid out by all of you will work today and for the next decade. Experience has shown me that another weak link will present itself with PHP, PHPBB, the host, and transfer software or some interaction or deficiency in one, some or all. This situation will reoccur again at some point because of some change made that may not be on the radar of the person updating, backing up, or restoring until it is too late.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by thecoalman »

Frank Sanns wrote: Sun Feb 13, 2022 10:41 am As stated by thecoalman, there is a database, a structure, and other critical folders. The critical ones are not in one folder. They are scattered around through different directories so you need to know where to look. Updates can even change some of these locations.
For properly updating a phpBB forum from any versions dating back to 2002 there is detailed instructions here:

https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... radeguide/

There is only three critical things you need to fully restore a phpBB forum. The /files folder, the /images folder (most importantly the uploaded avatar directory in it) and a copy of the database. All other files can be downloaded and in the case of config.php which contains the database credentials it can be recreated.

The default locations of these folders has not changed since 2007 but can be changed in the ACP.


Before this latest problem, had you noticed that the favicon no longer appeared on your latest browser update? It worked the previous iOS but not on the current one. It is not working on my desktop browser. This happens periodically and last time Andrew Robinson and I thought we had it set up for a majority of browsers but alas even that has changed through nothing that we have done.
This is outside of the scope of phpBB but the default location any browser is going to look for this icon is https://fusor.net/favicon.ico . This default icon is quite a small file and only really suitable for the icon next to bookmarks for example. If you want some of the higher quality icons supported by the various browsers and OS's ideally you have a fairly large square .png image with transparent background. There is various services on the internet that will generate the numerous types of files from your source file required by different browsers. These are uploaded to the root of the domain.

Of course running a separate site on the server to check a backup works.

You can do this locally using XAMPP. https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html
Do you go through 3,000 peoples post to see if a text, format, or picture is gone or changed?


It's valid point Frank but these issues are usually evident, you can also help determine any issue that may not be evident by checking server error logs

This is a minefield created by sloppy software technology....
There is a lot of valid criticisms of phpBB software but sloppy is not one of them, if anything the complaint from extension and styles developers is the standards are too rigid. phpBB is used on millions of websites that successfully update all the time including some heavy hitters with millions of members. The problems you have encountered are a series of errors compounding each other where the root issue was misidentified, starting with trying deploy a php version that didn't exist when the version of phpBB you were using was developed. Honestly I'm surprised Godaddy still allows php5.6 to begin with, it's been EOL since late 2018.

I have no confidence that using all of the steps laid out by all of you will work today and for the next decade.


What I can tell you Frank is I have not lost single post or file since 2004. I lost 1500 topics that year but it was direct failure on my part for not having a proper backup scheme. It was a very simple mistake but the consequences were huge. No backup scheme is bullet proof but there is many steps that can be taken to reduce the risk to nearly nothing.
thecoalman
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by thecoalman »

I've started downloading some of the backups Andrew has, the first backup has yielded about 1500 new files The attachment table references about 17,500 files and I currently have a real file count of about 13,100. The file count is fluid number at the moment because the files in the backup may no longer be referenced in the database. There is a few reasons for this such as deleting a file in a post since the backup was taken.
Rex Allers
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Rex Allers »

thecoalman,

Thanks again for your diligent efforts to reconstruct what can be done.

So beyond what might be expected with no vested interest in our forum.

Makes me want to switch to coal heating, but I'm far removed from any coal, let alone the hard stuff.

I did grow up in Pgh PA, like Frank, and remember digging some coal in a near-by field to fuel a small blast furnace in my backyard where I made bronze from tin and copper pipe. I think that was soft coal, though.

Fun to digress sometimes. :-)
Rex Allers
thecoalman
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by thecoalman »

Frank Sanns wrote: Sun Feb 13, 2022 10:41 am Before this latest problem, had you noticed that the favicon no longer appeared on your latest browser update? It worked the previous iOS but not on the current one. It is not working on my desktop browser. This happens periodically and last time Andrew Robinson and I thought we had it set up for a majority of browsers but alas even that has changed through nothing that we have done.
Glad you mentioned this Frank, if you browse to the fusor.net folder there is 33 new files I found in backup from Andrew.
Frank Sanns
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by Frank Sanns »

Super! The question is, where did they go? They were continuously on GD with no interruptions. All of the original files were in continuous and untouched from 2019 until a month ago. Where did they go and why did they quit?
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
thecoalman
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Re: Forum restore update Feb 12, 2022

Post by thecoalman »

No idea Frank and that is first time I came across them in any folders. They may take a while to start appearing as the browser will not request them all the time. You can google various methods to force a browser refresh of favicon.
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