Over the years I’ve helped friends hosting their own forum.
I’ve made them rent a Hetzner server, set up automated backups on Discourse, and I sync them to my Google Drive with rclone and a cron task. Each admin of each forum has access to their own backups on my Drive. It’s the simplest and safest I could imagine as a non-sysadmin.
A few times, I noticed the tokens were not refreshed on rClone (at least on one instance) and I had to reconfigure it. Because I have no alerts whatsoever if a sync doesn’t work, I just manually look at my Drive from time to time and ensure the last backups are recents.
If you were to voluntarily help someone or an association host a forum, what solution would you set up to ensure there are always backups somewhere that can be safely recovered if the forum blows up for some reason)?
I pull backups using rsync over ssh, with a restricted account, from a cronjob. Well, I don’t, but one of my mods does. I take and download a backup when I do an update. So, in the one case we could lose a few days of forum activity, and in the other case we could lose a month or more.
I should probably set up a crontab of my own. I could also increase the frequency of backups - presently set to 2 days.
In both cases we have to be moderately competent admins of our own systems. We should only lose the forum if both of us lose our downloaded copies and our own backups as well as the server itself.
Edit: good point, one must have some positive check that the process is working, and some idea, however shallow, that the downloaded backups are good.
I haven’t taken special care of the domain: ideally that too would have dual administration and joint ownership of some sort. If we lost control, the forum would have to reappear on a new domain - it could send digests and notifications to the members by email, so with a bit of trust they could rejoin.
Well, I’m backupping the database every hour It is same principle than with e-commerce — one must consider what is the biggest timeframe what can and/or wants to restore.
Agreed. If you’ve got the YML file(s) with the S3 configuration and backups on S3, then all you need to restore the forum on a new server is the YML file(s). This has the added benefit of not filling your disk with backups.
CAVEAT: You have to remember to pay the bill for the S3 bucket as well as the VM. I think maybe cloudflare’s is the cheapest?
I have had someone somehow lose control of their AWS account and lost all of their images. So just remembering to pay the bill is a cost not to be underestimated.
It is same principle than with e-commerce — one must consider what is the biggest timeframe what can and/or wants to restore.