Forum content keeps getting deleted

[jacobrosenfeld]

I setup a forum for a podcast that I help manage.

The forum was working perfectly until overnight the entire forum was wiped. Nodebb still ran but all of the users and content was wiped out. I found a backup restored, googled and thought maybe I had poor security. I upped the security in several ways relaunched the forum, setup more frequent backups. The forum was good for a few more days until this happened again. And again.

Since then I have up on relaunching until I can figure out the core issue.

Any thoughts?

[julian]

Are you using redis?

I have heard of some situations in the past were redis databases were not configured properly, so everything was stored in memory. A server would restart, and poof goes all the content.

[jacobrosenfeld]

I am. I thought that was my issue, but then I thought I fixed it.

How can I check if that's my issue and how can I fix it?

[FrankM]

I use redis for a long time.

In redis.conf

 ################################ SNAPSHOTTING  ################################
 save 900 1
 save 300 10
 save 60 10000
 
dbfilename dump.rdb

# The working directory.
#
# The DB will be written inside this directory, with the filename specified
# above using the 'dbfilename' configuration directive.
#
# The Append Only File will also be created inside this directory.
#
# Note that you must specify a directory here, not a file name.
dir /var/lib/redis

And be sure to start the server with the correct config. The correct user rights are also important!

In newer Redis versions something might have changed in the configuration file, please read carefully. This is excellently documented.

ExecStart=/usr/bin/redis-server /etc/redis/redis.conf --supervised systemd --daemonize no

[julian]

There's nothing wrong with Redis, this forum ran on Redis for a long time. The main limitation is that everything is kept in memory for quick access, so if your forum data is larger than available memory, then Redis crashes. Oops.

Anyway, if you have not configured Redis correctly and everything is held in memory (and only in memory), then the Redis logs will issue very loud warnings on startup. Inspect /var/log/redis for more details.

[phenomlab]

@julian Can you still use clustering without Redis? The clustering guide seems to indicate it's a requirement.

[julian]

I believe it is, although Ben Lubar did add in support for a singleHostCluster which uses EventEmitter

YMMV on using that one.

[PitaJ]

And if you're using redis for clustering, only user sessions are stored there. Everything else is stored on your primary database, if you aren't solely using redis.

[phenomlab]

@PitaJ Yes, only use Redis for Clustering - DB is Mongo