[jujjaa]

How much do backups of internet forums take space on harddisk? If the forum has 800000 messages how much would it approx. be? How long could someone dig those backups up if they don't exist anymore? And is it possible to dig up backups from three years ago in a police investigation or something? Or would they be definitely gone by then?

[Mak213]

Hello,

Internet forums do not store messages. That is done by SQL. Take this forum for example. You can go back to 2004 and find messages from when the forum first started still stored. IF the forum and hosting are good they will have backups of all the stuff from all times and be able to dig them up whenever they need to.

We still have old topics brought up and posts from when the old forum was up. That was well over 2 years ago.

Cheers,
Mak

[jujjaa]

Yes, but the forum that I'm talking about didn't store their backups for long. I know it because once they had to start from the beginning because their backups were corrupted ( I doubt that if they had stored all of the backups that they all would have been corrupted). So I know that these backups don't anymore exist. And by the way could them being corrupted make it impossible to find out what was written in the forum? So, now that I've given you more information maybe someone could answer my original question. I'd be very grateful. And sorry if the text is a bit hard to read.

[Mak213]

Hello,

Being corrupted doesnt mean that they cant access them. Can use several tools to open the database and get information from them. Maybe not all information but they could still retrieve what someone is looking for if it didnt get corrupted.

You still have not given enough info and i have already answered your questions. You dont know that the backups dont exist. You are not the webmaster. You dont know what they have done. You dont know how long ago they have a backup from. Maybe they said it was corrupted cause they didnt want to bother to get it working and jsut get the site back up and running again? There are several thousands of reason why a site wouldnt want to restore a backup.

The size varies. It depends on how the posts are stored. As i already said they are stored as a SQL database and it can get large but it wont be that large even for 800K posts. Maybe a few GB at most.

As i said already twice now the database if they have any previous backups can be dug up and checked out. There are tools to use to even look at corrupted databases. Jsut as there are tools to recover files from a formatted drive. There is a tool to recover everything and anything.

Plain and simple you are overly paranoid. Sorry but if you are so worried about a police investigation about something you did you should not be in a public forum. As that information can be dug up and used at any point. Just about every webmaster keeps the files for reasons just like that. 7 years is the statute of limitations. If they could not provide the information from that long ago if asked they would be in serious trouble. Possibly be under arrest for hampering a police investigation.

Nothing is ever truely gone on a PC. It can be recovered. The Govt has tools that can recover files from PC that we have never even seen before. FRom formatted PC's, from crashed and hacked web servers. All of it can be recovered and used.

If you are truly that paranoid i suggest you font get on the internet. Cause they can always jsut trace back your IP address and get a court order for the ISP to hand over the information about you.

Plus who is to say that the investigation has not gone on this long for them to have the data themselves.

Being in a public forum and posting anyting on a public site there is always a record somewhere. There are sites out there that have archives of old sites. The old posts and databases could be there and they might not even need to go thru that webmaster to get the information needed.

Cheers,
Mak