this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2023
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Beehaw Support

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Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.

A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.

Our September 2024 financial update is here.

For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.


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hey folks, here's another meta-post. this one isn't specifically in response to the massive surge of users, but the surge is fortuitously timed because i've been intending to give a good idea of what our financial stability is like. as a reminder, we're 100%-user funded. everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.

thanks to your generous support, we're pretty confident we have passed our current break-even point for this month, at which we wouldn't eventually need to pay out of our own pockets to keep the site running. that point in our estimation is about $26 a month or $312 a year. (please ignore OC's estimated yearly budget--we don't determine it lol)

our expenses are currently:

  • $18/mo toward our host, Digital Ocean. (yesterday we upgraded from DO's $12 tier to its $18 tier to mitigate traffic issues and lag, and it's really worked out!)
  • $2/mo for weekly backups
  • $4/mo for daily snapshots of the website, which would allow us to restore the website in between the weekly backups if need be.

for a total of at least $26/mo in expenses. this may vary from month to month though, so we're baking in a bit of uncertainty with our estimation.

we currently have, for the month of June:

  • $70/mo in recurring donations (at least for June)
  • $200 this month in one-time donations

for a total of $270 this month. our total balance now stands at $331.31.

that balance means we now have about a year months of reserves currently, if we received no other donations and have no unexpected expenses.[^1] the recurring donations put us well into the green at this point.

this is good! everything past our break-even point each month is, to be clear, money we can save and put toward scaling up our infrastructure. there is no downside to donating after we've already met our "goal" of basic financial stability. doing so will have pretty straightforward practical implications for you: fewer 500s, 503s, better image support (this takes a lot of space!), and the website generally being run on more than potato hardware.[^2] if you'd like to do so in light of this information, our OpenCollective page is this post's link. thanks folks!

[^1]: we will have at least one upcoming expense but its size is TBD, and so is how we'll pay for it [^2]: especially during times like now, where we've likely been getting thousands or tens of thousands of hits an hour

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[–] TheTrueLinuxDev 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In your situation, I'd recommend creating a script that performs the following steps sequentially:

  • Accumulate the hashes (ideally SHA-256 or SHA-512) of all files you plan to backup.
  • Create a text file that lists the file paths and their corresponding hashes.
  • Initiate the backup process.
  • Upon completion of the backup, restore the data to an auxiliary drive.
  • Compare the hashes from the text file to those of the restored data.
  • Alert you about whether the process was successful or not.

Regarding Borg backup, while it offers robust verification and security mechanisms, I've personally found its performance lacking, though your experience might differ. I would recommend thoroughly reviewing its documentation and conducting some trial runs prior to integrating it into a production environment.

[–] CobolSailor 4 points 1 year ago

Ahh okay. I do enjoy writing programs myself where I can so I'll probably still do it myself, but good to have options. Since it's just the MC server I'm truly worried about, I don't care too much about the performance within reason. I like the idea of a text file with corresponding hashes. Keep it simple! Or as my old shop teacher used to say, KISS, keep it simple, stupid.