testing what 

AH, ok

but ain't zero kb is nothing? so your test was a success 

nice animation BTW

Nevermind.....  I had found some zero KB attachments....bad files.  I was playing around with attaching and deleting files to see if I could make another one.  The files are just there they don't seem related to any real attachments on the boards that are in use.  One of those WTF moments.

I was poking around because we are installing another Forums backup system today.  A Linux machine.  It's task will be to do automated backups of the forums every day.

Windows can't do it properly and our ISP won't do backups.  So, if you want something done right....

Dave,

The system will work in the background at night when things are least busy.  No maintenance mode.  Not ideal but it is the way I have been doing it for years.  Problem is that Windows file names are not case sensitive and the Unix server is.  So, the attachments folder has many files with the same names...Things like fuel.jpg and fuel.JPG.  So...Windows cannot back these up because they are the same file name to the OS.

Plenty of storage.

Linux will be able to back up all since it sees files with different case and same name as different files.

Not that the attachments folder ever has had a need to restore but I don't trust the InMotion team to do backups...I was paying them for this and they were not doing it anyway.  Besides, we need daily backups.

So this is the solution. 

I had a good local 'puter store build it and then send over their Linux IT specialist to set it all up.  He had to do some coding to make it do what we wanted.....Should work.  We'll see.

Should be able to withstand a total meltdown and rebuild it all with some time.  All automated so we can't forget to backup......

I'll probably still continue to use my other two backup methods at least until I am confident in this one.

The other method is using the YaBB software itself.....That's the one that puts the boards in maintenance mode when it runs.  It's doesn't get used often because the forums are always busy when I am awake and I try to avoid shutting it down when there are users online.

Tom,

Forgive me for asking what may be a silly question..

Rather than posts being made to a single forum on one server why could not each post be committed to two separate servers with the same software on each, thus creating parallel duel copies of the forum.

No backing up required, you have redundancy and in the event of server failure you switch over to the duplicate immediately...