backup of these forums

[Antonio Linares]

As you know our forums have already been running for many years already (2005 october since I started them). I do regulars backups of it.

As we all have been writting there (so many friends, so many users, so many valuable questions and answers) I was considering to
offer a copy of its backup to a reduced group of us, so its the best guaranty that this information will never get lost, as you may know
that forums may have attacks and loose everything (I have seen this myself in the past).

The idea would be to select just a group persons that may be interested in having a copy (MySql backup file + an exact copy of the software that runs these forums) with the only intention to be able to reproduce a working copy of these forums in case that they were attacked or its use would stop for any circunstance.

The only risk is that if someone (non authorized) gets the file, they could take the emails accounts from it (as far as I know the passwords are not stored at all, just their CRCs, so there is no way back from them), but beside that, there would be no risk at all, as all that could happen was that carbon copies of our forums could appear, and I don't see a reason why someone may want to do that.

The idea would be that the backup (that really belongs to all of us) of it is not just hold by me, and we could never loose this huge and so valuable source of information.

[Silvio.Falconi]

Antonio,
a good idea could be a creation of a exe file reading mysql archives or i saw on my server (php admin) the archives can be save on xml file.
then you can create a procedure to read these xml files one file for each forum
and you can insert the exe on new package or send us.
The procedure can be easy to create ..but i not have idea
Just a suggestion

[Antonio Linares]

Silvio,

phpbb use a lot of related tables so without the phpbb software is really hard (I would say almost impossible) to use it.

The MySQL backup file allows to do an ascii search inside it, so the info is there, but it not the same as using these forums