# Wow, am I a dork! And thankful I didn't pay for it!



## Semper Fidelis (Jan 1, 2009)

A few weeks ago I was lauding the importance of offsite backup and somebody asked me if we backup the Puritanboard. I do. I actually have a daily, weekly, and monthly backup of a number of sites on the server. The files (including all the information needed to rebuild accounts and db's) is stored in a file structure on the server.

That's good but if the machine ever crashed we'd be in trouble if I didn't do more. Thus, I pay for about 30 GB of space to backup the backup.

In order to do this I use the rsync protocol using a command line. I'm not terribly linux smart so I've copied some command line examples.

Well, I figured out two days ago that I had been doing this "offsite method" for over a year and the command line was simply backing up the sites to another part on the same server. The last successful offline backup had been Jan 2008!

Well, the good news is that I fixed the rsync line and it's backing up offsite again. I'm certainly happy to have learned this lesson the easy way. Can you imagine losing almost a a year of posts?!


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## Hamalas (Jan 1, 2009)




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## Poimen (Jan 1, 2009)

I agree that you are a dork but I don't think it has anything to do with the latest debacle (from a fellow dork).

Hmmm... yes we have all been there from one time or another. We can be thankful for God's good providence especially when it pertains to our sinful mistakes.


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## Presbyterian Deacon (Jan 1, 2009)

Semper Fidelis said:


> The last successful offline backup had been Jan 2008!
> 
> ... Can you imagine losing almost a a year of posts?!




I joined in February 2008. It would have been like one of these bad science fiction movies. You wake up one day and find out you no longer exist!


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## Herald (Jan 1, 2009)

Rich, I would have helped you become a member of the PB witness protection agency had that happened. We would have relocated you to the faculty of Pensacola Christian College as a systematic theology prof. No one would guess in a million years.


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## Southern Presbyterian (Jan 1, 2009)

indeed.

Thanks to your diligence though the potential problem has been avoided. I, for one, appreciate all the hard work you put into the PB. God bless you!


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## Pergamum (Jan 2, 2009)

WOw, that means we would have had to re-fight all those baptism battles all over again....like Ground-Hog Day PB Style......

....wake up every morning and post on household baptisms.....



....WAIT! That's still happening!


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## Semper Fidelis (Jan 2, 2009)

_Put your loving hand in mine...._


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## fredtgreco (Jan 2, 2009)

Put your _*little*_ hand in mine.

Rich, you can have the brain tomorrow. I won't need it, I only have to go shooting pistols.


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## Semper Fidelis (Jan 2, 2009)

Are you kidding me? I've never been good at song lyrics.

One time, in college, I was singing a song and sang: "Way down South, let me hold you in my arms, I've been waiting all night long...."

My roommates never let me hear the end of that.


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## Timothy William (Jan 2, 2009)

Actually, I wouldn't mind if a few of my posts from the past year were judiciously lost in the ether. (Possibly including this one.)

I saw the thread title, and thought it was going to be more photos of Rich as a male model, with a new, dorky, military haircut that he didn't even have to pay for. The strange ways my mind works...


Again, thanks for all your work maintainingg the boards. It's good to know that everything is backed up and kept secure and all the rest, and we all understand that much effort goes into that behind the scenes.


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## Herald (Jan 2, 2009)

The truth is that A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers used the PB servers to funnel all their mortgage security trades. The PB actually started on borrowed servers from Enron. Little know facts.


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## lwadkins (Jan 2, 2009)

Don't you just love computers!


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## PresbyDane (Jan 2, 2009)

Jesus might as well have said "those who live by technology, shal die by technology"
It is Great 
Thanks for fixing it a big  for you.


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## APuritansMind (Jan 2, 2009)

Southern Presbyterian said:


> indeed.
> 
> Thanks to your diligence though the potential problem has been avoided. I, for one, appreciate all the hard work you put into the PB. God bless you!





We won't hold your lack of correct song lyrics against you...as long as you sing with a smile on your face! You've got your PB male model reputation to uphold! 

Seriously, thanks for the effort that all of the Administrators, Moderators, etc. put into the PB.


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## Richard King (Jan 2, 2009)

I just thank the Lord that he made people that will even mess with such things.
I would rather cut a cord of wood than even read a technical manual.
I've got this whole Jethro Bodine thing going and learning about computer stuff would just mess it up.


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## LawrenceU (Jan 2, 2009)

Semper Fidelis said:


> Are you kidding me? I've never been good at song lyrics.
> 
> One time, in college, I was singing a song and sang: "Way down South, let me hold you in my arms, I've been waiting all night long...."
> 
> My roommates never let me hear the end of that.





And, you're not a red legs either!


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## Hippo (Jan 2, 2009)

That is one of the problems with Linux, it is really not that user friendly in situations like this. You have to really know what you are doing to know what to do.


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## shackleton (Jan 2, 2009)

Semper Fidelis said:


> Can you imagine losing almost a a year of posts?!



"Oh the humanity...!!!"


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## Pilgrim (Jan 2, 2009)

shackleton said:


> Semper Fidelis said:
> 
> 
> > Can you imagine losing almost a a year of posts?!
> ...



Horror of Horrors! I guess maybe Google's cache could have been used to somehow restore things, although I'm not sure what you can do with it other than make a copy. 

If the posts would have been lost I might have felt compelled to repeat the baptism battle of mid 2008 all over again!

-----Added 1/2/2009 at 05:41:34 EST-----

What Rich is referring to is not a mere hypothetical situation. It has been known to happen. I know of at least one board that once was quite active but has had several problems over the past few years with bandwidth and maybe being hacked. (I don't know all the particulars.) It appears to be gone for good now. If not it might as well be. Who wants to invest time posting to a board that has had to basically start from scratch several times? At that point it's not much better than a chat room. Some may keep a record of their most important posts, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've done so. (I've been more mindful of keeping copies of blog comments I've posted that I thought important in case it didn't get approved, etc.) There are definitely disadvantages to email discussion groups, but one advantage is that people are often still going to have the emails even if the forum somehow goes down or the owner intemperately deletes it, which has also been known to happen. I think some of the early PB posts were lost (or at least aren't available on this site) when they were cut to reduce bandwidth, but we are fortunate that there haven't been any serious problems.


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## Zeno333 (Jan 2, 2009)

Just be glad you do not have to deal with IBM mainframe JCL like I had to do in the early to mid 80s working in the geophysical seismic data processing field. Anything is easier than that old JCL was.


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