A forum and its image gallery after a server move

A community forum with a separate image gallery had been moved to a new server by someone else. Image links across the board were dead, and a large part of the gallery had never arrived.

The objective

The board and its gallery had been moved to new hosting before I was involved. Afterwards the images embedded in forum posts stopped loading, the logo was wrong, and the team found whole days of gallery images missing.

The gallery holds more than 600,000 files. At that size, the method used to copy the files decides whether the copy is complete, and there's no way to tell just by looking at the folder.

What I did

I compared the old and the new image addresses and found the gallery software now serves images from a different path. Every link stored in an older post pointed at an address that no longer exists, which is why the images were dead rather than missing.

I explained why their own file transfer had looked complete when it wasn't. Many servers list at most 10,000 files in a directory over FTP, so an FTP client reports success after copying a fraction of what's there and gives no sign of the rest. I recommended rsync, which is what a copy that size needs.

I worked through what else the move had left behind, including a JavaScript fragment stranded in old posts and image links whose size suffixes no longer resolve.

And I told them to keep one person on the server at a time. Two people fixing the same thing had already wiped files that were working.

The result

The board came back with its images loading and its logo right. The gallery sync was finished by their own contact using the method I'd described, and they had an account of what the first transfer had actually missed instead of a guess.