It seems the forums I frequent on Ezboard got hacked and consequentially lost all of their messages. They’re muttering about ‘restoring some boards’ but it doesn’t sound like they have a coherent or recoverable backup anywhere.
I know they’re a free service but this whole situation smacks of incompetence. First they got hacked so clearly there’s some security issues to deal with. Secondly they seem to have no real backups whatsoever – not even for their ‘Gold Communities’. This is inexcusable imho.
Remember that these boards are essentially just TEXT BASED BULLETIN BOARDS. There are no attachments on the boards (you post images by linking to another host site). Ezboard communities also appear to ‘age’ so old messages in active forums eventually just go away. All of which suggests it should have been fairly easy and painless to backup their servers (or at least the forum data) to some high density format. Oh and I believe text probably compresses quite nicely too.
Oh well, I guess I need to finish some terrain so I can post *new* articles up!