You Think You Got Problems?!?!?

[Vin DSL]

LoL! I thought you might get a kick out of this...

The ISP that was hosting my sight was hacked, and now they are going again, but the problem now is my whole web sight is all gz files. I have over 2gigs of files and i'm downloading it all so i can unzip each file, but is there a php script or something I can run to uncompress every file and delete the gz file? For example the index.php is now index.php.gz, etc... I varified i can uncompresses them all but this will take forever!
Thanks!

[jason]

Man, that sucks. Sounds like a backup proceedure gone awry (doesn't the host know to tar everything and then gzip the tar file? LOL). It would be easy to script, though.

--Jason

[Vin DSL]

Man, that sucks. Sounds like a backup proceedure gone awry (doesn't the host know to tar everything and then gzip the tar file? LOL)...

Heh! Sounds like some of the hosts I've had in the past. That's why I maintain my own backups.

Being hosted at JagPC spoils you! Ppl don't realize how bad it can be...

[jason]

At least the host had a backup. I've had hosts that didn't. I agree with you on the backup thing, Vin (imagine that, we agree on something ). Everyone should keep their own, even if they are with a great host like JPC.

--Jason

[Vin DSL]

Everyone should keep their own, even if they are with a great host like JPC...

Absolutely! Positively!

I don't know if you remember the ill-fated Phoenix/Photon debacle here. Tech Support was doing their best to restore the sites that resided on 'that' evil machine; doling them out to new homes on various servers; a couple here, a couple there. It was a painfully slow process for 'them', as well as 'us.'

I finally told them, look, just give me space somewhere (anywhere) and I'll have my site running in an hour. I didn't need 'them' to restore my web site[s] from a tape backup, or whatever.

Anyway, to make a long story short, JagPC gave me a place to park it (Neutron) and I had everything up and running in under an hour. I couldn't have done that if I hadn't maintained my own backups.

I'm not 'beating my chest'. I'm just reinforcing what you said - something which we both can agree upon. Do your own backups. Don't depend on a mass webhoster to do it for you, no matter how good they are...

[Sara]

And people should have learned that lesson after having been hosted on some of the free sites (Where many of us started out). Specially Fortunecity were notorious for yearly total HD failure. Ack that was fun watching people running around like headless chickens

[Connie]

Never depend on a host for backups. Even a good host like Jag can have corrupted back ups. I can restore my site without Jag. It will take more than an hour but I can get my site back up unless my back up site on a different server, and my PC all fail at the same time.

[Vin DSL]

And people should have learned that lesson after having been hosted on some of the free sites (Where many of us started out)...

LoL! My first web host was "Phrantic's Trailerpark" (Free Homepages for the Homepageless!)...

http://web.archive.org/web/199812120.../phrantic.com/

Anyone remember them? Cutting-edge stuff, back then...

[Connie]

No, and I don't remember my first host. Other than the bad support I got. The price was like $25.00 per month, for something like 50 mg of space. Back in those days I did not have a site but what I had was important to me.

All my problems in those days were e-mail related. Ask support a question you might get an answer in 24 to 48 hours. Or you might never get an answer. If you did it was always the same. Everything is fine. You don't have a problem.

Just thought I would throw a little more nostalgia into this thread.

[jason]

LoL! My first web host was "Phrantic's Trailerpark"...
Anyone remember them? Cutting-edge stuff, back then...

Can't say that I do, but I loved that hot pink background color that came up before the background loaded. Archive.org was so slow loading the images that I thought I was back in 1998, surfing through my 33.6KBps modem!

I got into building personal websites sometime around 1996, but I was in school back then and pretty much just used the space that my school gave me for my sites. I think they gave us something like 8Mb back then! I also remember having an account with a company called something like NetTaxi. If I remember, they offered free web space and a single POP3 account. I just checked and www.nettaxi.com still works, although they offer dialup and DSL now and I didn't see any mention of free web space anymore. I think I also had an angelfire account at some point, too.

My first "paid" hosting company was called HostingPlans and they offered a ton of space (100 Mb, I think, a ton for the time) on Windows servers for about $20/month. Shortly after I joined they began offering "lifetime" accounts for $200--which got you the same amount of space for "life" with no bandwidth restrictions. Their customer service became unbearably slow after that offer began and then one day I discovered that I no longer had a site. Their main site said that they were experienceing problems on some of their servers and to be patient. Then that site disappeared too and that was the last I heard of that company.

--Jason

[Gwaihir]

May I ask how you guys make those home backups? I mean: sure I have a "master copy" of all the files and scripts and sure I download a backup of the database from cpanel when I think of it But well, that is on average once a month, I think, so not exactly what I'd call having an up to date backup all the time. Do you use some scripts or something to do that daily? Do you use a way to backup only differences to keep the bandwith useage of such a daily backup down?

[Connie]

Wim my simple back up plan is this. I have a site that I test everything on before uploading to one of the other 2 sites. Fortunately all 3 of my sites are on different severs. So I have a copy on my PC and on the test site. I know my simple plan will not work with you guys who use SQL but it works for me. I have downloaded backups a few times over the years using the CP back up, but I have never understood how such a small download could actually be a backup of my site.

I used to keep a copy on a disk. Guess I need to start doing that again. If my commerce sites crashed, Jags back ups were corrupt, my PC crashed, and my test site crashed at the same time I would be s**t out of luck.

I'm sure there is some way to back up a SQL data base. You would probably loose some information when restoring the information but that would be better than being completely wiped out.

[Vin DSL]

Do you use some scripts or something to do that daily? Do you use a way to backup only differences to keep the bandwith useage of such a daily backup down?

In the old days, I simply used FTP and mirrored my site to my local PC. However, that's out of the question now. Even if I did it the 'old school' way, that wouldn't backup my sql db.

These days, I use phpMyAdmin to backup my db[s]. I do a dump to an uncompressed .SQL file and download it to my PC using WinSCP.

For everything else, I TAR my site, using GZIP compression, and download the TARBALL to my PC.

Or, sometimes I get lazy and simply use cPanel. It all depends on the mood/mode I'm in...

Once I download this stuff to my local PC, I never get rid of it, unless the download is corrupt. I have backups going all the way to the mid-90's.

I don't do backups, on a daily basis, unless I've been spending a lot of time modifying programs, or whatever. Except for the stats, things don't change much on my site[s]. However, if my livelyhood depended on it, I'd be doing backups hourly, using some sort of automated process.

[Spathiphyllum]

I do a cPanel backup of my entire site and a separate SQL db back-up about every other day if I'm not making many script changes and daily otherwise. Better safe than sorry, and since I don't have that much content, my bandwidth usage is not a problem.