spore.org: changes

Backup strategy

One of the most obvious things we've learned from the last week is that more than anything else, spore.org needs a sensible backup strategy. Discussion on what form this is going to take is happening right now, but we're open to outside suggestions, especially if they come with offers of help or hardware. Basically, we need to provide a solution that is fast, easy to maintain, and will provide us with a good hedge against catastrophic loss. It would be nice if we could recover lost files for individual users, but the focus will be on making it so that the system can survive another severe crash without data loss for the community as a whole.

I'm going to get up on my soapbox for a moment here and say something that should be obvious, but apparently isn't. I spent part of today responding to an e-mail from a very cranky person who took issue with my attitude in the transition FAQ. In particular, he thought our attitude towards system backups was "grossly negligent". I will agree that we could have done a better job of making it so that we didn't lose people's web sites and inboxes and the backups all at once. If we'd had more available time and hardware resources, this almost certainly would have been handled a different way. I'm sorry that the way we did (or didn't do) things cost a lot of you time and important data.

At the same time, it is never a good idea to trust other people to back up your critical data. We try very hard to make spore.org a professional, secure and reliable hosting environment, but the project is basically a shoestring volunteer organization, and as such we can make no guarantees about data integrity. We will do our best to keep random internet perverts from molesting your stuff, and we'll try to keep the whole thing from going up in a huge ball of flame, but Stuff Happens. Even when we get our fancy new backup system operational (and I guarantee you that there will be regular, scheduled backups happening before the end of the month), I implore you, please keep local copies of stuff on the system. It will make you, and us, feel a lot better.