Just thinking.

When I was younger I used to follow a rail-themed forum (name withheld). One day it crashed and when it came back online a few days later, it was a blank slate. A lot of informative, well-written posts were just gone. I know it was a free forum, but I still felt betrayed.

As an aside, that feeling of betrayal comes from the sense that there is an unwritten deal between forum user and owner. Users provide good, free content and plenty of traffic for the owner, and the owner keeps the site stable. Well when the forum crashes and resets, the users re-assess whether they want to continue contributing. Many don't and leave for good.

Thinking now about Rypn. There is a wealth of great info in these archives. For example, someone Googling a certain piece of equipment might run across the comprehensive lists by RainierRails. Or someone Googling about something like Russia Iron, might find this forum. It's obviously not a for-profit website so the owner might decide to stop paying one day. I've also read it is more-or-less like a plane flying on autopilot with no one at the controls any more. The situation seems pretty unusual here, so it's got me thinking.

So are we safe from a server crash here? Is all the archived info at risk of vanishing overnight any day?

No idea what the current backup situation is, but as thorough and careful as David is, I'm sure it is well done. That having been said, I have a complete backup of RyPN prior to 2009 all the way back to the beginning of time.

The industry trend is to massive replication, automatic failover and multiple data centers. This is an expected part of the term "on the cloud". It's so robust that data loss from hardware failure is essentially a thing of the past. Even a lesser strategy such as RAID 5 + backups will suffice if the datacenter is on the ball. On my sites, my web hoster takes care of all of that, for cheaper than I'd pay just for the electricity to have a server at home.

But you're right, might be good for somebody to "back up" RyPN as it were.

Wouldn't it be neat to have a phone "app" that scraped/archived RyPN so you could read it on an airplane.