Lost and gone forever!

[Antipodean]

Just a concerned thought!
I love this site and the information and intellectual content it contains. What concerns me is the possible loss of this information. While this does not seem likely - it has happened to another site that I was a member of. While the question is probably is the backup of this site kept “Off Site” and easily accessible, I will tell you of the other sites fate so those that know can ease my concern or take my concern as advisement.

The site in question was satellite reception based. No – it did not deal with hacking secure encrypted feeds – any posts that were in that direction were swiftly dealt with. It was more Amateur Radio - this model receiver uses this version of open source UNIX. It also uses this version of open source mpeg decoding.  The standard model does not support “Blind Scanning” so if you make a modification to the source code here and recompile the kernel you can make it “Blind Scan”. It was for our own amusement no one was reselling modified receivers or any such thing.
Along came brand X receiver sporting all sorts of bells and whistles – mostly open source. Ah! it has one open source feature (modified) that was originally written by one of the members. As per the open source agreement the originator asked for the modifications to his source. It was not forthcoming. Rebadged receivers start to hit the market so the request was also made to the re-branders as per the open source agreement. Still nothing. Complaints were laid with the open source foundation and legal muscle was being brought to bear.
Suddenly the site was no longer there – it appears the owner of the site was slow (One day over due) in renewing his domain name. By slow I mean there is a grace period of about three weeks (I think) and it was the very first day into the grace period that he went to pay for the name to find that Brand X had taken his domain name. Now legally they cannot do that but they had managed to coerce the domain name registry into handing then his domain name. He immediately started legal action on the domain name company and they admitted that they should not have handed it over. However Brand X then put stays in place to prevent any changes until a hearing could be held which they indicated would be some time away.
In the mean time Brand X had as the owner of the domain name had the web hosting company remove any trace of the website and forum from the server AND the backup tapes. Even if he gets his website domain name back all the years of posts and information is lost forever.
I'd feel like I’d lost a child if it happened here.

[proteus]

The site is hosted on multiple-redundant hardware, with RAID-5 SAN disk holding the primary copy. Our host keeps an hourly on-site hot spare, daily on-site tape backup, and weekly off-site archive. I personally keep a monthly off-site archive (not more frequently due to bandwidth costs... this will hopefully improve in the future).

Three different domains point here, all on auto-renew: brassgoggles.co.uk, brassgoggles.org, and steam.punqs.org.

Our site policy also permits The WayBack Machine to crawl us, though their backups only go to 2010 at the moment their backups only go to 2010 at the moment).

Our host has been given instructions to turn server access over to another person should I be unreachable for a pre-defined period of time, and all passwords are stored in a vault that will allow my wife access should something happe to me.

There may be outages; there may even be some data loss at some point. But short of being unable to pay bills, we'll never just disappear. And that ability depends entirely on the support of the members through donations and subscriptions. So, as long as enough people are willing to pay to keep the server online, we'll be here.  (Barring something unimaginable, of course).

[Mr Peter Harrow, Esq]

And the whole thing is on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, in a disused toilet in the cellar with a "Beware of the Leopard" sign on the door. Please be careful of the stairs (broken) and the light (also broken).

[Dr cornelius quack]

Our host has been given instructions to turn server access over to another person should I be unreachable for a pre-defined period of time, and all passwords are stored in a vault that will allow my wife access should something happe to me.

P.S. Find Robert Langdon.

[akumabito]

Our host has been given instructions to turn server access over to another person should I be unreachable for a pre-defined period of time, and all passwords are stored in a vault that will allow my wife access should something happe to me.

P.S. Find Robert Langdon.

roflcakes..

[architect]

I am having an issue. as I had a great deal of how to and such on goggle creation, in a thread I had in the trading thread, but sadly this is missing and as such all the thought that went into tools and process, seems to be lost. is there any chance that this might be something we can dig out of a back up, and place in a tactile thread on goggle making?

[architect]

also searching that site for anything pertinent is useless, you have to log into their version of the site, in order to read anything on it.

this is in regards to the wayback copy of the brassgoggles site.

[proteus]

You are mistaken about needing to log-in to the Wayback Machine; it requires no such thing.

As for the thread in question, it's possible that it's in a backup if the thread were popped recently, but I'd need to know an exact date to search for. Backups of deleted threads are not kept for more than a couple of weeks.

[Professor Phineas Brownsm]

P.S. Find Robert Langdon.

hehehe