I had to pull the site offline on March 1, 2020 to run some maintenance.  It looks like the main hard disk was full due to our monthly backups taking up too much space. 

I was led to the problem when Zed Head posted that he could not attach an image to a post.  I attempted to upload my own image and saw the error.  Soon after the problem occurred, I saw that other errors suddenly started to appear.  After reviewing the hard disk information, it was at 99% capacity.  I looked for the largest directories, and discovered that we had monthly backups since June 2019 stored on the same drive.  Each backup is approximately 150MB in size.  So, I deleted some older backups and moved others to a new partition.  Every one of our backup files are also sent to AWS in case of catastrophic failure, so, there is no problem moving or deleting these older files.  I left the backups for the last three months in the same partition however this may happen again.

The website is still due for some updates, but, (in order to get some sleep) I decided to hold off on the backups until more time can be allocated to the task.

I may also need to increase storage space in the summer months of 2020.

It made me more aware of how easy it is to post a photo to show what I can't explain.  The ZX mud guard on "missing parts" was mine from yesterday.

Thank you Mike.  You do keep some late hours working on this forum.

It can be demanding to be a parent!  Thanks for the great care of your "child", we truly do appreciate it.

do backups get put into an aws s3 bucket?

Do you have to keep everything backed up on here, like for us to find archive stuff?  Seems like you would.  Is that what the servers do?

Curious is all.  Don't waste a minute on my dumba**.  

19 hours ago, heyitsrama said:

do backups get put into an aws s3 bucket?

Yes, I keep a copy of the site daily, weekly, and then I archive the whole thing every month to a .gzip file.  It replicates incrementally to S3 every night.  I only ran out of disk space because we had so many monthly archives.  I would put the whole server on the cloud if it wasn't for the exorbitant fees.  Instead, the server is parked in a rack at a hosting facility in Seattle.  S3 backups are pushed over-the-border to Oregon.

18 hours ago, siteunseen said:

Do you have to keep everything backed up on here, like for us to find archive stuff?  Seems like you would.  Is that what the servers do?

Curious is all.  Don't waste a minute on my dumba**.  

See above...  ?

Backups are mostly to handle a major system failure.  On-site backup are paired with off-site backups in case we lose our hardware.  I was using AWS a long time before most common people knew about it. 

If we do have a catastrophic failure, we would only lose 1-day of information.  Although it may take me a few days of work to get it all back online.

2 hours ago, Mike said:

I would put the whole server on the cloud if it wasn't for the exorbitant fees.

oh interesting, i pay for a server on Linode under their $10 a month line but its not a super beefy setup, just enough for some small functionality.

Just out of curiosity what kind of system is being used to host the site? Can we get some joocy performance metrics? ?

I'm in AWS land the whole day, they make it easy to spend your money....

On 3/3/2020 at 10:21 AM, heyitsrama said:

oh interesting, i pay for a server on Linode under their $10 a month line but its not a super beefy setup, just enough for some small functionality.

Just out of curiosity what kind of system is being used to host the site? Can we get some joocy performance metrics? ?

I'm in AWS land the whole day, they make it easy to spend your money....

Sure!  Our capacity is at 250GB and historically transfer about 20GB per month.  Our database is 18-19GB in size and file storage is approx 220GB.  Server is a dedicated HP Proliant DL380 with approx 4TB in total HDD capacity.  Quad processor with 32GB of RAM.  It's a bit overkill for just this site, but, it's also doing other things such as email and backups.  The 250GB I mentioned above does not include backup space, so, you can multiply that by approx 150GB for every backup (I typically like to keep 3-4 backups).  

I estimate hosting this on AWS would cost approx $500-600 a month, which is more than double our current cost.