Thanks Lance for the bumper stickers

[JTheotonio]

Lance,

I received the bumper stickers in great shape.  It's raining today so I can't stick them on the truck.

Also thanks for the nice note - glad to help.  I am impressed with this site, your work for the sub museums and with all of the guys posting here.  So much knowledge coming from all of the postings.

I don't know if you do this regularly but I sure would back-up all of these posts.  There is so much information that it would be terrible if some cyber demons wiped out all of these threads.  I've seen it happen.

[Darrin]

I have to agree about backing this bbs up frequently, sadly it has happened on other submarine related bbs' and a HUGE amount of information was lost each time that it happened
Keep up the good work with this bbs Lance and everyone that has contributed to it, those who don't post much if any please get involved and put your .02 in, it will make this already great bbs better.

Darrin

[Lance Dean]

You're quite welcome!

Backing up is quite a story.  Everything typed here in posts, the member list, the calendar, and everyone's PMs, are stored in the MySQL database and can be backed up with the click of a button.  That's the easy part.  I try to remember weekly to optimize the database, check it for errors, and download a copy.  Amazingly it's not quite a megabyte yet!

All the attachments and all the modifications made to the default theme (lots) can't be saved easily.  The attachments folder is where every file/photo/avatar is stored, and all the filenames are encrypted.  Not much encryption to them other than a file that used to be named "photo.jpg" once uploaded as an attachment becomes something crazy like "176_photo_jpg39e1df28d45d103971f77f13ae262c2a".  The database remembers that it renamed the file as such.  If the database ever got corrupted, the linkage would be lost and all attachments would be scattered.

So basically, posts are safe, forum look/layout is somewhat safe, and attachments/files/avatars are not very safe.

[Coolhand]

as i said in the PM, thanks again for the DVD and the sticker Lance. don't get on the computer much anymore but wanted to express my thanks for both.