Daily backup failure + potential changes

Hey everyone! So I come with bad news. Yay! Well, good news and bad news. The good news is we've never actually needed one of backups that Sally made! Hooray for us! The bad news is we've not actually had any backups that Sally... Didn't make, I guess? (in full, anyway - it always crashed on the shelter information) This has been going on for... I don't know how long. Too long. One day is too long so that's not saying much... But. Yeaaaaahhh. That's only slightly terrifying... If we'd had a catastrophic failure of some sort then... Haaa. Oh boy. It's not like Niet doesn't have code to tell him if it fails, either - but because of the specific way that it's been crashing, it hasn't been telling him that it's been failing. What genius is this before mine eyes!?. He's gonna be making a separate process to check if Sally actually wins / loses the game of "backup", though, so in theory if it crashes again then he should be told. Image courtesy of Novie!

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Now, on to the second part of this. So, the long story short is that the reason this has been happening is because of the length of time that is being taken to complete the backups. At this point, we're at about 20 minutes... That's... Uh. Longer than it was before. It used to be like 7 minutes... Oof. So, the thing here is that we can either continue with the daily backups now that we've fixed the problem or we could move it to being weekly, potentially. It would cut down the downtime and such. Obviously, as we grow, we are going to continue seeing the backup time increase. The more information there is on the site, the more stuff there is to backup, after all! So... That's the thought experiment - the question is... What do you guys want? Continue with the daily backup or change over to weekly? [Adding a poll in a moment so feel free to answer via that] Thank you for reading ~<3

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Edit: Updates have been made to the way the site is backed up - we've shortened the time down from 20 minutes, to 10 minutes! :D I'd edit the poll to reflect this information but you can't edit polls :p

I, personally, would much prefer a once weekly hour-long backup than 20 minutes every night . I feel like just making it 4 backups a month rather than a backup every day would be much more intuitive... that's not the right word but I feel like you get what I mean lol

Even if it is a pain in the butt, I really prefer the security of daily backups rather than taking the chances of a weekly backup. Even if it's wonderful that we've never needed the backups so far, if the time does come one day that we do..................that's 7 days of progress, potentially. 7 days of melans, 7 days of dex progress, 7 days of interactions, IP, breeding, everything. Unless there's a sufficient way of restoring what has been lost (which would be hard to prove, I could imagine, besides maybe ZC bought from the site itself) I still vote for daily backups. Unless, of course, I am misunderstanding what the consequences of a crash/etc would be, which is very possible. :P I've never known of the effects in detail since it's never happened nor have I seen explained in much detail besides Oh It'd Probably Be Bad

I think that a week between would be long enough to not put too much strain on you(maybe, I don’t know how this really works on your end), but frequent enough to be safe just in case. A week isn’t too long of a time to make up if lost. I don’t really know how this would affect you and the other developers, so that might make a difference. Thank you for making an effort to fix this.

Can I ask where you're getting an hour from...?

Doing it once a week would not change the amount of time that the backup would take, for reference. It would just change how often we do it. It doesn't affect us at all. That's why we're asking you guys for your opinion :)

Was just reaching into the abyss for a number. 20 minutes a day for 7 days a week would be about 2hrs 20 mins? So I was about half right. oop, garth has done me a correct. It wouldn't take any longer at all. Whoops.

a week would be way too long, and just be unsafe. i think there should be a backup at least every other day. even if it is the user base that chooses the week, there'll be riot if the backup ever is needed and a weeks worth of info is lost.

It's better to have a daily backup. That way, if, god forbid, one of your updates caushes a problem so bad you have to go back to a previous save, people only lose the hard work of one day at most instead of a week's worth of hard work.

I understand that the Daily downtime can be annoying, but I feel Kiryu above had the right idea. Potentially anywhere from a day to a week of lost data from interactions, s/a/m hunts, pokerus, tournament/contest stats, etc., would effect everyone, from being a minor annoyance to newer/not as active players to brutal for vet players S/A/M hunting. Yea it would still be rough to lose a day in a failure, but at least it would be only a day.