A club forum moved off a server that was being shut down

A vehicle club's forum moved to new hosting, with everything copied off the old server before it was cancelled. That's what saved the photo albums when the club found their own backup was incomplete.

The objective

The forum sat on old hosting the club wanted to stop paying for. The board ran on a PHP version current hosting no longer offers, so the software had to move forward as part of the move rather than after it.

The club's photo albums and downloads were the part they cared about most and the part least likely to survive, because they were handled by an add-on rather than by the forum itself.

What I did

I moved the board to the new host and got it running on a supported PHP version.

I copied everything off the old server, the album files included, before the old hosting was cancelled, so nothing hung on the club's own backup being complete.

I told them the album import hadn't worked, instead of leaving it open, and pointed them at the folder where the files had landed so they could rebuild the albums themselves.

I gave them three ways to reach the old site while its domain pointed at the new one, with the drawback of each spelled out: a hosts file entry, a third-party preview service that shouldn't be given a password, and a temporary subdomain.

Later, when several accounts unexpectedly showed up as founders, I went through the database, restored the rights to the three accounts they named, and confirmed no other account held them.

The result

The club runs on current hosting on a supported PHP version. Their own backup of the photo albums turned out to be incomplete, and the files were still there because everything had been copied.