Tarot History Forum

Dear All,
Ross and I are planning on updating the forum software from 3.2 to 3.3 on the 24th. Hopefully, this will go smoothy, but there is a very real chance that we may run into issues as our current version is quite old and rather unstable. Therefore, whilst we hope that the update will happen without a hitch, we recommend backing up any important threads in case anything unexpected happens.

Thanks very much,
Robert and Ross

Isn't it a safe way, if you just make a safety copy of the forum, which you just place in another folder. I think, that this might be done in a single copy operation.
How big is the forum? How much Gigabyte?

The interesting part is the edited text. You cannot count the size of pictures, which are placed at other places. Let's say, an average posting has 10.000 byte. We have about 22.000 postings, not counting deleted files.
10.000*22.000 = 220.000.000, about 0.22 Gigabyte, if the average posting comes to 100.000, even then it are only 2.2 gigabyte.

I've more than 4000 posts here in the forum. Do you have an idea how much work it is to save them individually? And how often the forum structure is copied without being needed?

The message below has 128 byte. that is what one line can produce. The message above has 7 filled lines. 7*128=896 byte. If all lines would be full, the text might have 896 byte.
*********************
*********************
*********************
*********************
*********************
*********************
********

We have to do it, the php will no longer be supported by the server after 1 August.

I'll save all the text, once someone tells me how. I don't know the size of a full copy, images and all, but I have plenty of room and speed to do it.

There is a tool ...
http://www.httrack.com/
http://www.httrack.com/page/2/

Download HTTrack Website Copier 3.49-2

I gave it an attempt ... (without knowing what's clever) ....
I got in 4 hours 1 gigabyte of material, but till now it looks only like material which was used by us from foreign webpages (pictures) , not the texts made by ourselves.
Maybe this (my methode) is not clever. There should be a better way. For the moment this attempt is still running.

added:
It scans the page by download, and it searches links to foreign websides and then it gets the pictures as material to display it at my own website.
For the moment it has about 9400 pictures from c. 500 foreign webpages. In the moment it works at very big pictures from RossCaldwell.

Thanks Huck, hopefully that is useful. I'm very sorry the update is causing disruption. Hopefully, the upgrade will go smoothly (or not too horribly at least!) and everything will be okay, but I wanted to forewarn in case there is an unexpected problem. I'll back up the database and image files and hopefully, the instructions will work successfully.
Best wishes,
Robert

I'll do that too, thanks Huck.

Yes, my pictures are hosted at 1&1. I have a lot of space and things I can do with that account, but I haven't exploited it enough.

I have now 6 Gigabytes of material in 24 hours and I don't see a near end. The methode clearly takes more things as it are needed for a save protection.

I got the message from the program, that it is done. I estimate about 8-9 Gigabyte was used. The logfile has a long list of errors, but the most don't look dangerous.
If I really got all and everthing I naturally can't say.

Great! I haven't done it yet. That is a lot of data.

The shorter and the better way to save the forum content is to save the old forum BEFORE ANY CHANGE to a second independent place. This should be much less content, perhaps 1-2 gigabyte.
If then the transfer of the forum doesn't work, one still could make the decision to present the old form in a frozen state (without active members) , and simply start with a new free Forum with the possibility to quote from the older.