Ah the domain configuration would be an aspect of the discourse software, not on digital ocean. Maybe @Miguel can help? I don’t remember actually whether I initially set it up or he did.
Another option— if you’re familiar with /etc/hosts file you can redirect discuss.actualism.online on your computer , to the reserved IP. And then see if it works …
Ok, so can I find the installation via logging on via the console?
Yes, I am familiar. I will update with the new versions reserved ip and give it a test.
Ya exactly. It’s running on the droplet. SSH’ing in would also work.
No, I don’t remember having configured the domain…
Testing with the hosts file took it to the droplet made from the snapshot only.
I had to open an incognito session on Chrome to get it to work, otherwise closing/re-opening Chrome was caching.
Awesome.
Ok my grand plan is to post a notice here, back up this site, switch DNS, restore backup on new site, remove notice and we’re good to do !
Thanks for your help!
Probably I can do it Thursday evening …
No worries, nice to learn something new. Ok, so now that we have a droplet on the other team created can we just overwrite that droplet with a new snapshot or would you have to create a new droplet all over again?
I’ll use discourse software to do the backup / restore , of just the data. So no need for new droplet!
Ok cool, good luck. So you will SSH via a terminal on your computer/laptop on the original droplet, extract the data back up and then SSH into the new one and restore the new data?
I will use the admin interface of discourse, I believe it supports it all through the web interface
Let you know that I have just closed the AWS account after terminating all the resources we used (I hope, at least!).
So I have temporarily reconfigured Discourse to make the backups only locally, until the new bucket in AWS is configured (by the way, @son_of_bob; if you want and have the time to configure it yourself, it would be good because then someone else would know the procedure, we could make changes later more easily, etc.).
In any case, after the new S3 service is up and running we will have to redirect the forum backups to the bucket once again, and later the staff members will have to perform the procedure for individual synchronization once again (explained in the first post of this very topic Backups, and detailed in https://discuss.actualism.online/t/personal-syncs-with-backups/138).
Hi @Miguel,
Sure, happy to help and learn the process involved.
The second link you sent me doesn’t work it states that it is private.
I’ve added you as a moderator , you are now officially staff member 
and you should be able to see that link now
Thanks @claudiu, such responsibility…on the plus side I can’t do worse than he who shall not be named lol.
I have never been a moderator before actually, does the guide just cover the basics?
Actually I think I may have jumped the gun here since there’s discussions that aren’t visible to other members there. I should confer with them before adding new members to be able to see it, so I revoked it for now. Sorry for the rollercoaster ride of emotions
Yes sure, that is fine and makes sense. Please feel free to personal message me any relevant information regarding the backup stuff. Moderation is of less interest to me rather than actual tech support and learning new products I don’t work with normally. Additionally, being able to help if the worst case scenario happens and we need to rebuild the forum and site.
How could you? Whyyyyyy? Its so unfair lol 
True. I forgot you were not part of the @staff group.
Anyway, that second link (which I made for the staff only so as not to unnecessarily drive other users crazy) only indicates how to make the individual backups automatically using MultCloud. It’s only for when the S3 is configured.
So, you do not have any restrictions (nor any specific help from these posts; sorry) to go ahead with the bucket configuration (which I don’t remember being complicated).
In spite of this I think it would be good if you were a moderator (even if it was just for technical help).
Ok, so is there a MultCloud account for the AIAFF or does this need to be set up? Or do you mean for me to set up my own account with MultCloud as a separate backed up instance in the same way you have in the examples you have shown in the first post?
Out of curiosity I have looked into how Discourse can be hosted in Azure. I have my own Azure instance for my business and that I use in my work. Interestingly there is no direct S3 equivalent in Azure, there is an option for using Azure Blob Storage with a third party tool Flexify.IO that is used for translating between the two protocols. At least it has given me an idea of something to play around with and test in my own time.
Exactly: your own account as a separate backed up instance, as shown. And no one else must be able to access that personal account, so nobody and no event will have the power to delete all existing backups hosted in different places.
Well it was a little complicated, two missing pieces:
I tried manually restoring the backup on the new server from the command line ( Restore a backup from command line - admins - Discourse Meta ) but I couldn’t find the ‘discourse’ folder .
Then I realised it was on the volume, which didn’t copy over. So I had to transfer the volume from old server to new server, I did it with these two commands:
rsync -rltdvu --progress root@143.244.209.33:/mnt/volume_sfo3_01/ volume_sfo3_01/
rsync -rltdvu --progress volume_sfo3_01/ root@146.190.15.141:/mnt/volume_sfo3_01/
Then the command line restore wouldn’t work anyway, so I had to do it through the web interface with the /etc/hosts hack.
But then it wouldn’t load the backup page. Clicking on the error, it said the AWS keys were invalid. So I had to change the settings to be local backups.
Then I was finally able to restore it on the new server from the web interface (since I had already copied the backup locally it was available as an option).
Now we just wait for the DNS to propagate…