Upcoming DSI Website/Forum Downtime 03.27.18 & 03.28.18

[Robot Heart]

You may have noticed some posts were deleted between March 10th - March 18th. These posts were lost due to a hosting error, and unfortunately their most recent backup was from March 10th.

In light of this, we're migrating the main DSI website and DSI forum to a new, and more reliable host with daily backups. Though we anticipate the migration taking just a few hours we are blocking out a bit more time just in case.

Tuesday, March 27th: Main DSI website will potentially be down 3pm - 11.30pm

Wednesday, March 28th: The DSI forum will potentially be down 3pm - 11.30pm

[dslsynth]

Thanks for letting the community know! Going for a higher quality hosting service sounds like a very good plan. Hope that DSI have the time and resources to make manual backups of the site and forum data before the migration (for very obvious reasons).

[Robot Heart]

We were thinking of no backups before migrating, after all what could possibly go wrong 

[Gerry Havinga]

We were thinking of no backups before migrating, after all what could possibly go wrong 

Sounds like a good plan. I recommend to backup to /dev/null which ensures guaranteed backup success 

[dslsynth]

Digital lifeforms are similar to human lifeforms in that they both require some kind of maintenance to thrive. While a forum is a pure digital entity its mostly run by humans and in order to keep their interest its best that it runs smoothly and without any data loss (ref: old forum).

If the hosting service is accessed by ftp its fairly easy to make a mirror of all the files using wget. The database usually require different backup tools but that should be offered directly by the hosting service.

In any case: good luck with it!